Recognizing a voice command (NSSpeechRecognizer) in Objective-C

Okay, Lets say you have a complicated application and you know you can do something in it but you cant remember how to get there. Standard UI rules state that you shouldn't overwhelm the user with controls and options. So, how do you help out the user? What about voice activated controls. Objective-C provides access to an object (NSSpeechRecognizer) that works with the computers voice recognizer to help you out. Just getting it to work is tricky.

So, here is the source code for the application. You can download it from my iDisk by clicking here.

I don't know how long this will be up. It all depends on when I get the actual server running. This is just a temporary thing.

For those who don't want to open the source code, here is how you get a NSSpeechRecognizer Object to work.

• Instantiate your object
• Set the Delegate to "self" in the INIT method of your control, like so:
• [speechRecognizerObject setDelegate:SELF];
• Create a delegate method (Essential, just put in this method header in your controls .m file)
• - (void)speechRecognizer:(NSSpeechRecognizer *)sender didRecognizeCommand:(id)command{}
• Fill in the blanks between the {}'s
• As long as you have the delegate set to self, the object will look in the class where it is instantiate for that method. When a command is recognized, it will send it back in (id)command object.
• Just so you know, it will only recognize a given set of commands. To set these commands, you will need to pass in a array of commands. I use a NSMutableArray to handle this. You can send in the commands using the [speechRecognizerObject setCommands:arrayOfCommands];

I know I'm going to have fun with this one.

I think I figured out through this demo app how to figure out if the mouse moves or not. It took me this application to fully realize how delegates worked in Objective-C.