Capturing Dictation

Sometimes you want a command which recognizes any words you might say rather than recognizing a particular set of alternatives. For example, searching for text is a common operation in Microsoft Word. It would be nice to be able to speak a single command to search for the text you want rather than needing to speak a command to open the "Find" dialog box, pausing, and then speaking the text you want to search for.

You can use the special variable <_anything> in a command to match any spoken words:

With this command you could search for the text "will do" by saying "Find Text will do", which opens the "Find" dialog box, enters the text "will do", and launches the search. (Note: if using this macro for Internet Explorer you need to call Wait after the {Ctrl+f})

Note that <_anything> matches anything you say. Prior to DNS 13, this included saying nothing. So, in those versions, in the above example saying "Find Text" would bring up the "Find" dialog box to search for nothing. Since this may be unexpected it's a good idea to use at least two keywords in these commands (i.e., Find Text <_anything> instead of Find <_anything>) to reduce unwanted recognitions. DNS 13 and later do not allow nothing for <_anything>.

<_anything> may appear anywhere a regular variable term appears, and may even appear more than once in a command. It may also appear as a command by itself (<_anything> = ...;), which will roughly match anything not caught by another command (see the discussion on ambiguous utterances).