10.7 Next Steps

Kudos to you for completing the last project in the book. As you have seen, enabling voice recognition is a remarkably trivial matter and while the technology isn’t perfect, it’s still pretty wild that we have the ability to control our home in ways that were considered science fiction twenty years ago.

Take this higher-level automation skill further by pursuing the following enhancements:

• Expand the spoken email routine to include saying the timestamp and message body. Add the ability to delete a message or reply to an email with prepared templates (ex: “Reply yes”).

• Duplicate the script’s iTunes artist/album lookup array functionality for the Skype client so that you can place hands-free calling to anyone on your Skype contact list. After saying “Make a call,” the script will populate a listen for array with the contact names in your active Skype account. Like the artist name response, reply with the name of the contact you want to call and the script will automate Skype to do so.

• Add Text to Speech extensions to the Tweeting Bird Feeder and Package Delivery Detector Python scripts that speak status updates when events like bird landings or package deliveries are detected. This can be done via an Open Script Architecture (OSA) shell command.[109]

• Bring speech recognition to other computing platforms besides Apple OS X by converting the script to an Android application by calling upon Android’s RecognizerIntent intent or Microsoft’s Speech API for the Windows platform.[110]