Mode Design

This page provides some advice you can follow when designing your own modes and commands.

Application Specific Modes

Utterly Voice provides modes for a handful of applications, but you most likely use other applications as well. You can probably use the default modes to navigate all of the applications you use, but this may not be very efficient. To use your voice efficiently, you should plan on creating application-specific modes for the applications you use often.

For an application, you should define commands for all of your commonly used operations. For example, a mode for your favorite text editor would have commands for opening a file, saving a file, closing a file, selecting text, searching for text, navigating, etc.

For many applications, this means that you define commands that execute keyboard shortcuts provided by the application. The more keyboard shortcuts an application provides, the more efficient you can be with your voice. Whenever you have the choice between applications that accomplish similar things, always choose the applications that have the best keyboard shortcuts.

Also remember that commands can execute more than just a single keyboard shortcut. Commands can execute a series of actions that involve keyboard shortcuts, normal typing, and time delays. If there are any series of actions that you perform regularly, you should consider creating commands for them.

Activity Specific Modes

In addition to creating application-specific modes, you may want to create additional modes that are specific to certain activities. For example, if you are a programmer, you should create a mode for your favorite editor, and a mode for each of your favorite programming languages. Another example would be creating a mode for a specific project you are working on, with commands to handle frequent typing related to the project.

Whenever you find yourself typing similar content many times, always consider whether a command could accomplish this for you.

Mode Names

Your mode names should be unique, easy for you to say, and easy for the recognizer to correctly transcribe. For occasional recognition failures, you can add alternate name values to the mode.

Command Names

Defining good command names can have a significant impact on your efficiency. Here are some important things to understand:

• Different modes can use the same command names, but you cannot activate modes that share common command names. This prevents ambiguity in command execution. For example, you might create modes for two different text editors, where each editor has an "open file" command with different keyboard shortcuts. Utterly Voice will pop up an error if you attempt to activate both of these modes. If there are modes you frequently use together, ensure that the command names are unique.
• Command names should be short, easy to say, and easy to recognize.
• Few of your command names should match text that you frequently type. Whenever you need to type the name of a command, you can use the "escape" command.
• When the Utterly Voice interpreter receives an utterance, it starts processing the words in order. Before typing the words, the interpreter checks for a possible match with command names. Command names can contain up to four words. The interpreter gives precedence to commands with more words. For example, if you have commands "show" and "show left", and you say "show left", the "show left" command will execute. If you say "show hello", the "show" command will execute.