Question

Is there a way to check whether the user has enabled speech recognition (spoken commands) in System Preferences? (Mac OS X). If the user has it enabled, I would like to support additional speech commands. Unfortunately there isn’t any method in NSSpeechRecognizer to check this and I can’t seem to find any Carbon functions to check it either.

One of the problem is that the round Speech Commands window (the one with a microphone on it) seems to appear intermittently whenever I instantiate NSSpeechRecognizer. Also it often freezes my app for about half a second or so while the object is created (probably it’s starting up the speech recognition service).

In essence, if the speech recognizer isn’t already running and being used, I don’t want to start it up. But if the user actively uses the speech recognizer, I would like to provide additional support for it.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As inspired by @Yuji‘s answer, looks like the only way is to check whether the speech recognition server is running or not. Here is the code snippet, in case anyone also need it.

+(BOOL) speakableItemsEnabled {
    NSString* speechServerBundleName = @"com.apple.speech.recognitionserver";
    NSArray* apps = [NSRunningApplication runningApplicationsWithBundleIdentifier:speechServerBundleName];
    NSRunningApplication* speechServerApp = [apps lastObject];
    return speechServerApp && !speechServerApp.terminated;
}

Hopefully this doesn’t break in 10.7 “Lion”.