Compound Utterances

A simple utterance contains either a single command or text to type. A compound utterance contains multiple commands or a combination of commands and text to type.

For example, the following are simple utterances:

• "this is a sentence to type"
• "go left five"

And, the following are compound utterances:

• "capital this is a sentence to type period" ("capital" and "period" are commands)
• "go left five clear left three" ("go left" and "clear left" are both commands that have a number argument)

Handling Optional Arguments

Some commands accept optional utterance arguments. These arguments have default values when they are not supplied. For example, the "page down" command has an optional number argument that has a default value of 1. If you say "page down", the page down key is pressed once. If you say "page down four", the page down key is pressed four times.

When you say a compound utterance with multiple commands and/or words to be typed, you need to consider how optional arguments are processed. If a word is spoken where an optional argument is expected, that word will be processed as an argument. For example, consider the utterance "page down hello world". The word "hello" is treated as an argument for the "page down" command. Since this word is not a number, this utterance contains an error and is ignored.

The correct way to handle this situation is to supply the argument when more words follow the command: "page down one hello world". This results in the page down key being pressed once, followed by typing "hello world".

If you find this confusing, you can simply avoid compound utterances with commands that have optional arguments, and say each command as its own utterance (with a brief pause between each utterance): "page down", "hello world". Once you become proficient with Utterly Voice, you can start using compound utterances with all types of commands to gain efficiency.

Chaining Commands for Text Editing

When editing text, it is frequently convenient to chain commands in a single utterance. For example, consider the following text:

If the cursor is at the end of that text, you can say "go left eight clear left four movie" to replace "book" with "movie". This utterance presses the left key eight times, presses backspace four times, then types "movie".