Category Archives: Tips

Friday Tip: Filling out forms

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about filling out forms using speech commands.

Here’s how it works:

The UC Keyword List allows you to say “Find” followed by any word or phrase to select that word or phrase in any program that has a Find dialog box. This includes Firefox and Internet Explorer. You can combine the word-finding ability with the Tab key to go straight to any field. For example, “Find First Tab” puts your cursor in the “First Name” field.

To see the forms facility in action, take this self-guided tour:
“Demo 2 File”
“Find Address Tab”
44 State St.
“Find Phone Tab”
555-555-5555

The Keyword List comes loaded with common key words and phrases. Say “Add Keyword” to add your own (say “UC Lesson 10.1” for detailed instructions).

4/15/09 Note: The release version of Utter Command also includes the UC Tab List, which allows you to mix tabs and phrases in order to fill out two fields in a form at once. For instance, you can say “2 Tab John 1 Tab Smith”, to tab 2 fields forward, then fill in “John” and “Smith” in successive fields, or “3 Tab Address” to tab 3 fields forward and fill in your address, for instance 29 Downing St. See the UC List explanation in Overview for details, including pictures.

Friday Tip: Removing formatting in programs that don't have "remove formatting" functions

It’s easy to remove formatting from selected text in a Word document — “Control Space”, but what do you do in programs that don’t have this function?

There’s not a keyboard shortcut for removing formatting in Google documents, but here’s a two-step way to get the job done. You can copy the text to one of the UC Clipboard files, which will save it as .txt, then paste the plain text from that file.

Here’s the sequence:

Removing formatting from selected text in a Google document
Copy to 1 File
1 File Paste

You can speed things up by selecting text and copying to a UC clipboard file in one step. Here are a couple of examples:

Selecting text and removing its formatting in a Google document
Line Copy to 1 File
1 File Paste

or

2 Graphs · Copy to 1 File
 1 File Paste

Friday Tip: Removing formatting in programs that don’t have “remove formatting” functions

It’s easy to remove formatting from selected text in a Word document — “Control Space”, but what do you do in programs that don’t have this function?

There’s not a keyboard shortcut for removing formatting in Google documents, but here’s a two-step way to get the job done. You can copy the text to one of the UC Clipboard files, which will save it as .txt, then paste the plain text from that file.

Here’s the sequence:

Removing formatting from selected text in a Google document
Copy to 1 File
1 File Paste

You can speed things up by selecting text and copying to a UC clipboard file in one step. Here are a couple of examples:

Selecting text and removing its formatting in a Google document
Line Copy to 1 File
1 File Paste

or

2 Graphs · Copy to 1 File
 1 File Paste

Friday Tip: Saving and making a new paragraph in one step

It’s important to save documents you’re working on (say “Control s”), but it’s all too easy to get absorbed in what you are writing and forget to save.

Here are a couple of commands that make this easier:

Making a new line and saving in one step
Enter · Control s

Making a paragraph and saving in one step
2 Enter · Control s

Speeding search by speech

Keyboard shortcuts are powerful tools for the speech interface because they work across all programs and they can be combined — you can say several keyboard shortcuts in one phrase to speed things up.

This is why we encourage all software makers to make all features available via keyboard shortcuts.

Google is experimenting with adding keyboard shortcuts to search results. Here are the experimental keyboard shortcuts:

Command Action
Letter J Selects next result
Letter K Selects previous result
Enter (or Letter O) Opens selected result
Slash Moves cursor to search box
Escape Moves cursor to results

And here’s how to speed things up further with Utter Command combinations:

Command Action
Letter J · Enter Opens next result
Letter K · Enter Opens previous result
J Times 1-100 Moves down 1-100 and selects result
K Times 1-100 Moves up 1-100 and selects result
J Times 1-100 · Enter Moves down 1-100 and opens result
K Times 1-100 · Enter Moves up 1-100 and opens result
Escape · Enter Moves cursor to results and opens

To try these out

1. Go to the Google experimental page www.google.com/experimental/1
2. Under the Keyboard Shortcuts heading click “Join Experiment”
3. Go to regular Google search www.google.com2 or Advanced Google search www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en3, type a query, then try the shortcuts on the results.

As long as you’re logged in you’ll be able to use these shortcuts in the regular and advanced Google search pages.

Note: the Join Experiment button uses cookies. If your browser is set to remove all cookies at the end of a session and you want to retain this setting add www.google.com to your exceptions list (Firefox: Tools/Options/Privacy/Exceptions; Internet Explorer: Tools/Options/Privacy/Sites).