Master iTunes with XP’s Speech Recognition
As a follow up to our post on getting speech recognition for Windows XP (and 98, 2000), we’ve decided to write a series of tutorials on controlling your applications with it (The speech recognition is not as full featured as in Vista and therefore can’t handle much more than basic commands).
This collection of tips will focus on controlling iTunes (playback). We’ll be focusing on switching songs, and general play/pause and next track (we’re still working on getting previous to work).
Please note that I have Shuffle on for all of these tips. Also note that iTunes must be the active window for any of these to work.
Using Cover Flow
- Spacebar to play/pause, next/previous do not appear to work
- Say the name of the song to switch to it (a bit rough, you may get the wrong song, saying the first word of the song is usually easier).
- Say enter in order to play the selected song.
- Page Up and Page Down move the song list.
- Move Down and Move Up change selected song on song list.
- Move Left and Move Right moves to the left/right on the cover flow.
Mini Player
(Advanced → Switch to Mini Player OR Ctrl + M)
- Spacebar to play/pause, Move right to go next, Move Left to go to the beginning of the song, then to go previous
- Saying any random thing causes the player to pause/play.
Hope these tips come in handy. Why iTunes? Windows Media Player doesn’t appear to have any way to interact via voice. And don’t kill me for my lack of music (taste).
I'm Jason, the main author of Third Error, and many of the topics I'll focus on concern Windows (and applicable software), web applications, web design, and a bit of *nix (Ubuntu mainly). My computer runs Windows XP, with virtualized Ubuntu and OS X handy.