Available on macOS Catalina and iOS 13, Voice Control is a method of interacting with one’s Mac or iOS device using only your voice. “There’s something in each operating system and things for a lot of different types of use cases.”One announcement that unquestionably garnered some of the biggest buzz during the conference was Voice Control. “One of the things that’s been really cool this year is the team has been firing on cylinders across the board,” Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s Director of Global Accessibility Policy & Initiatives, said to me following the keynote. This mellifluous male voice. Every year Apple moves mountains to ensure accessibility’s presence is felt not only in the software it previews, but also in the sessions, labs, and other social gatherings in and around the San Jose Convention Center.When OS X 10.5 Leopard was uncaged back in 2007, Apple included some new high-fidelity text-to-speech capabilities in the form of a single new voice called Alex.The company’s ethos to innovate and enrich people’s lives is a boilerplate talking point at every media event. The sense of unbridled pride and joy I got from talking to people involved in the project was unlike anything I’d seen before. You talk, it responds.And Apple could not be more excited about it.The excitement for Voice Control at WWDC was palpable. At a high level, it’s very much a realization of the kind of ambient, voice-first computing dreamed up by sci-fi television stalwarts like The Jetsons and Star Trek decades ago.It’s some of the most touching work we do.”Federighi’s account completely jives with the sentiment around WWDC. “Thinking about the passion members of the Accessibility team and the Siri team and everyone who pulled that together is awesome. The demonstration went so well, he said, that he almost started to cry while backstage.“It’s one of those technologies…you see it used and not only are you amazed by it, but you realize what it could mean to so many people,” Federighi said to Gruber. During the segment on Voice Control, Federighi recounted a story about an internal demo of the feature he saw from members of Apple’s accessibility team during a meeting.Apple has spent time talking about accessibility at various events over the last several years, and for them to do so again in 2019 serves as yet another poignant reminder the company cares deeply for the disabled community. Like with the decision to move the Accessibility menu to the front page of Settings in iOS 13, the symbolism is important. It took, as mentioned at the outset, a massive, cross-functional collaborative effort to pull this feature together.In a broader scope, the emotion behind seeing Voice Control come to fruition lies not only in the technology itself, but in its reveal too.That Apple chose to devote precious slide space, as well as a good chunk of stage time, to talk up Voice Control is highly significant. I’ve heard the engineering and development process for Voice Control was quite the undertaking for workers in Cupertino. The consensus was it is so great.
![]() 2The differences are vast. One of the banner features of the iPhone 3GS, 1 released in 2009, was Voice Control. “Knowing that accessibility is important enough for Apple to highlight at a huge event like WWDC reaffirms to me that Apple is interested and engaged in furthering and enhancing these technologies that give me independence.” A Brief History of Voice ControlThe Voice Control feature we know today has lineage in Apple history. Siri wouldn’t debut until October 2011, with the iPhone 4S.The Voice Control of 2019, by contrast, is a supercomputer. 3 Of course, Voice Control’s launch with the iPhone 3GS in June 2009 pre-dated Siri by over two years. In the voice computing timeline, it was prehistoric technology. The functionality was bare-bones: you could make calls, control music playback, and ask what’s playing. At the time, Apple touted Voice Control for its ability to allow users “hands-free operation” of their iPhone 3GS Phil Schiller talked up the “freedom of voice control” in the press release. Change default program for new images macThey are clearly differentiated, however, largely in their respective interaction models. Both enable users who can’t physically work with a mouse or touchscreen to manipulate their devices with the same fluidity as those traditional input devices. Voice Control’s Target AudienceThe official reason Apple created Voice Control is to provide yet another tool with which people with certain upper body disabilities can access their devices.Voice Control shares many conceptual similarities with the longstanding Switch Control feature, first introduced six years ago with iOS 7. The Voice Control that will ship as part of macOS Catalina and iOS 13 is light years ahead of its ancestor it’s so much more sophisticated that it’s exciting to wonder how the rest of the voice-first game is going to play out. But once you compare it to where it was a decade ago, the progress made is astoundingly obvious. With this Voice Control, you quite literally tell your computer to wake up and do things like zoom in and out of photos, scroll, drag and drop content, drop a pin on a map, use emoji – even learn a new vocabulary.When talking about emerging markets or new technologies, Tim Cook likes to say they’re in the “early innings.” Voice-first computing surely is in that category. Voice Control Full Control OfBy the same token, harnessing Voice Control is decidedly not like using a command line. Pretty much any task you might throw at your MacBook Air or iPad Pro, chances are good Voice Control will be able to handle it.There is somewhat of a learning curve, insofar as you have to grasp what it can do and how you speak to it. Either way, it’s good that accessibility get more mainstream exposure.As Mackay told me in our interview: “I feel Sarah Herrlinger said it best when she said, ‘When you build for the margins, you actually make a better product for the masses.’ I’m really excited to see how those with and without disabilities utilize this new technology.” How Voice Control WorksThe essence of Voice Control is this: you tell the computer what to do and it does it.Apple describes Voice Control as a “breakthrough new feature that gives you full control of your devices with just your voice.” The possibilities for what you can do are virtually endless. Likewise, others might simply find it fun to try Voice Control for the futuristic feeling of telling their computer to do stuff and watching them respond accordingly. It might find appeal to people with RSI issues, as using one’s voice to control your machine would alleviate pain and fatigue associated with using a keyboard and pointing device. From there, you can say “Tap/Click New Message” and a compose window pops up. With Safari running on your iPad (or iMac or iPhone), you can tell Voice Control to “Open Mail” and it’ll launch into Mail. Imagine a scenario in which you’re browsing the web in Safari and suddenly remember you need to send an email to someone. Take writing an email, for instance. And of course, emblematic of the Apple ecosystem, the fundamentals of Voice Control work the same way across iOS and macOS.Voice Control also is integrated system-wide, 4 so it isn’t necessary to be in a particular app to invoke a command. The truth is Voice Control is flexible it is designed to be deeply customizable (more on this below). Other commands, such as “Double Tap,” “Scroll,” and “Swipe,” are common actions as well depending upon context. Basic actions in Voice Control involve one of three trigger words: “Open,” Tap,” and “Click.” (Obviously, you’d use whichever of the last two was appropriate for the operating system you’re on at the moment). When you’re finished, saying “Tap Send” sends the message.As the axiom goes, in my testing “it just works.” To initiate Voice Control, you tell the computer to “wake up.” This command tells the system to get ready and start listening for input.
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