Review: Audiomatic

Audiomatic, $45
Wise Riddles Software
Renton, Washington
http://www.wiseriddles.com/Products/Audiomatic/index.html

Unlike some applications I've looked at in the past, Audiomatic is almost trivially easy to understand. It's a tool to make system-wide macros that can launch programs, play sounds, run scripts, simulate keystrokes, or speak text. Of course, there are plenty of applications that can do that. The twist to Audiomatic is that, in addition to launching macros from keystroke shortcuts, it also understands voice commands. So, you can get to Google's Web site by speaking "Google" into your computer's microphone in addition to remembering whatever esoteric key combination you assigned to the macro.

Audiomatic installed easily and after the expected speech training session I was off and recording macros. The interface for this is simple; pick the type of macro, fill out properties, assign a keystroke and/or a voice command, and you're done. The major setup decision you need to make about Audiomatic itself is when it should listen for commands: only when you go into the Options dialog and tell it to, when you toggle it on using a keystroke or voice command for a limited time, or when you toggle it on until you tell it to stop listening. For example, it's easy to set up things so that any time you say "Jeeves" it listens for five seconds to see whether you come up with a recognizable command and then goes back to sleep.

The doanload is a bit large (a tad over 50MB), but of course that's because they're carting around all the Microsoft speech redistributables. Other than that, there don't seem to be any nits to pick here: this is a utility that does one thing, and does it well. So really, all you need to do is decide whether you need that one thing enough to pay for it.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.