Controlling a virtual Apple II by voice

[bloomer_au <bloomer@iprimus.com.au>]

I have to carefully manage RSI that I have in my arms and hands these
days, which restricts the amount of typing, programming and gaming I
can do.

I recently bought Mac Speech Dictate speech-to-text software for my
MacBook so that I could cut back significantly on all typing
activities at the computer.

Unfortunately, I have this Apple II game I'm writing that still needs
a decent amount of work, but it's hard for me to avoid typing if I am
to finish it.

This made me wonder if I could use the speech-to-text software to
program in an Apple II emulator. The software seems to be unable to
translate my speech directly into a virtual Apple II. I tried multiple
emulators, and in most cases my speech was entered as garbage
characters.

However I knew that Sweet16 for one could type in text copied from the
MacOS environment and then pasted into the emulator. So I tried to
exploit this fact to create a way to be able to speak into the
emulator.

I came up with an AppleScript which, when I said the magic word
(ENTER),
would copy the contents of a Text Edit window, add a return character,
switch to Sweet16, paste those contents there (thus' typing' them and
then pressing return on the Apple II) and then switch back to Text
Edit, ready for my next utterance.

This worked. By booting Sweet16, then opening a Text Edit window
beside it, I could basically type into the Apple II by voice.

You can play an adventure game this way, saying GO NORTH, ENTER, GET
ALL, ENTER, etc. You can also program, though the software is
obviously designed to recognise English words, not Applesoft or
assembly mnemonics, so I tend to have to spell out the programming
letter by letter. This can be a bit slow, but you get used to it
quickly, and hey, I'm not typing! A person could create further macros
to enter commonly used commands.

Today I got a bit fancier. I wanted to be able to tap things like
'control-t' and 'control-b' to to control the up and down flow of the
Applesoft turbo editor that I use. So I've got it so I can just say
Up, or Down. Doesn't turn on a dime but it works. I can start a
program listing search by saying Search, and find the next incidence
of something by saying Again. If I say Screen, the currently visible
text contents of the Apple II screen are copied over into the text
edit document.

I'm just letting everyone know that you can operate a virtual Apple II
this way if you need or want to. The speech software equivalent on a
PC is called Dragon, and I imagine using some PC equivalent of
AppleScript you could do similar stuff on that platform.

-Wade