Free Voice Activated Macro Program on PC

I have not tried any of the voice activated tools like Cortana, Siri or Google Assistant. The idea that your voice is being listened to and information transferred remotely does not appeal at all.
The idea that something is listening to you and triggers on a specific command infers that it is listening to all your other speech as well. If its taking that information somewhere else, who is to say what is being done with it. So tools like Alexa and other home automation that works on processing your information elsewhere has no appeal. Shades of dystopian 1984 by George Orwell.
A small programme that lives on your computer, you do have some control of. If you don’t want it on, you can switch it off and delete the programme. You can control your privacy in a way that I am comfortable with.

Voice Macro

Voice Macro is fun. With VoiceMacro your computer, application or game can be controlled by voice commands and/or by the press of a keyboard, mouse button or combinations of it, additionally you can start any of your macros by scheduler, by a macro action, or from an external program.

Another point it makes later is – The voice recognition gets SIGNIFICANTLY better (self learning) for each new voice command over time.

Here are a couple of videos demoing simple instances, the first in a scripting programme and the 2nd in a game. The 2nd one is more interesting. There are other videos, not many, and mostly silent LOL as its a voice activated programme.

On setup it offers to install a VoiceMacro demo profile which has a few macros for you to play around with. I have just added a couple to this for testing.

The first one I added was my Open WordPress Blog post and login in Firefox  AutoHotKeys macro, that I initially developed in Pulover’s Macro Creator, then did a bit of editing in the .AHK file before compiling it. I have edited it a bit as the pauses between key actions seem to be important in the process, so getting them right took a bit of testing.  I ran into a couple of issues along the way that I wanted to sort out.

So, in some ways, that was just one line of code, as it went and got the .exe file, then I added a pause and then asked it to speak text (Robot voice) “ Creativity macro running“, just so I know its been activated.

I also tested one of their demo commands after going offline to see if it required going onto the internet to run, and the programme worked fine.

The programme runs in the Taskbar tray, I have it set up for starting when windows does. The main Voice Macro window has little icons on top right, so you can Toggle Shortcuts, Listening, Scheduler and Executing Macro’s (I suppose they could conflict with other programmes)

So I can voice activate some of my macro’s instead of using Keyboard Shortcuts, which is handy as I’m running out of those.

Adding folder to Windows Taskbar

This is another “I didn’t know that” , but now I do, I’ll use it a lot.

I do a lot of driving from the taskbar. Now I know you can add specific folders to it, I’ll be using that too.

Specifically for AutHotKey you are coding in Notepad or similar, you need to save the file , right click the file to test it. You can keep your window open ( I did notice on a video tutorial that there is a SciTe4AutoHotKey editing programme where you can run the .AHK from inside the editing programme (you can run inside Pulover’s Macro Creator editing programme too). So this is a handy way to have quick access to the file for testing.

There is a video on how to get the Folder down into the taskbar.

There was also the option to put an address bar for Web searches , but it didn’t recognise the FireFox Bookmarks Keywords so I took it off again as my taskbar space is already quite cluttered.

AutoHotKey changing default editor

AutoHotKey default editor is Notepad. I prefer using notepad++ instead. So I wanted to get windows to associate a different editor with the .AHK filetype. This ended up not being as simple as what I thought. Here is a topic on the AutoHotKey board discussion how to do it.

To run the file, the .AHK file type has to be associated with AutoHotKey.exe, which makes sense, so how do you get a different editor associated with that programme? You have to go into your Registry by running regedit. I normally keep right away from that, but the process was quite painless, following the discussion on the board.

AutoHotKey YouTube Tutorials

I am great for leaping in and just trying a programme out, then I get in a muddle and have to go back and learn something about it. The CivReborn video tutorials on AutoHotKey I found very good.

Here is his initial playlist on AutoHotKeys. I also started watching some of his ones on the AutoHotKey GUI interface.

I was quite excited by AutoIt for its Gui interface and didn’t realise that AutoHotKey had one too. I also note that AutoHotKey grew out of AutoIt and they work in a similar manner.

Other AutoHotKey programmes , Pulover’s Macro Creator and  ShortKeeper are handy and robust tools so I will focus on AutoHotKey rather than AutoIt for the moment.