My Artistic Voice

[pasithea]

A little more fooling around with AppleScript today and then my first pieces of work produced using voice assistance. Not very complex pieces, in fact, both are sketches that'd been sitting in my temp directory since July of 2005 (I cleaned up my drives today too) but suitable as test subjects.

So far, this experiment is feeling extremely successful. Workflow feels much more natural than hitting the palette and switching tools all the time. I can keep my pen right where I am working which makes for more accurate continuations and just overall makes things a lot faster.

Not as big a gain in Photoshop as in Illustrator, of course. OMFG, how have I lived without voice command for Illustrator!?!? 'Move layer up/down/to top/to bottom' are awkward key combinations, and going back and forth between 'vertex select', 'pen', 'scissors', and hitting 'join', and especially killing that F***ing window that pops up after join if you miss. This is working SO much faster it's just amazing!

I'm doing a mix of some voice commands and some left-hand commands. Holding down the CTRL and SHFT keys, for instance. Tomorrow I'll see about doing a bit more complex piece using my new setup. (Now that I'm mostly done futzing with it. :)

Ulmek by ~dv-girl on deviantART
Accidently inverted a selection in a sketch and it looked interesting so I made a brush that matched the pencil strokes and painted in more texture with other colors using a 'lighten' layer. Result was interesting enough to me I uploaded it to DA.



Hosted on TWU.net
A tiny scribble from my sketchbook that had good expression in it. Not my best Illustrator job but I can't blame the tools. Looks OK as an icon though. :)

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I have a bias against voice commands, but that's probably because the last time I used any sort of voice commanded software was on a computer with a 133mhz processor and it worked terribly. I don't think I had ever even thought about doing any kind of digital art at that time, although I may have been aware that MS paint existed. In my imagination using my hands for hotkeys seems much faster than actually having to say something. My goodness I don't even talk to my family when I want them to do something, I just grunt and flail.

Also, I would have to make the command for zooming in be "Enhance" so I could sit there just like in blade runner. Could you also get it to play that weird series of clicking noises the way the computer did in blade runner whenever it zoomed in?

That would probably be annoying long run, but a video of it would be cute.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Sure. I could make it 'enhance' and play sounds. I've thought about having it do a text-to-speech confirm of the command. So I say 'zoom in' and it says 'zooming'

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

In that case could you set up clever little feedback chain reactions where you tell it one command, and then it responds with a sound of you giving it a different command and so on, such that you procedurally set it up to draw a simple doodle for you, sorta like setting up dominoes =D? Wow that would be geeky.

[yetanotherbob.livejournal.com]

Could you also get it to play that weird series of clicking noises the way the computer did in blade runner whenever it zoomed in?

Yeah. She could have have the applescript use Play Sound or, well, I think any sort of shell script could happen, too. (That's one really awesome improvement in Applescript since OSX: it can directly call shell commands.

Oh, also, DVG: iTunes applescripts that might interest you. Hmm. He's got more here that are much more directly speakable, like play next, fast forward, or open a specific playlist..

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

You're supposed to make the clicking noises yourself... that's part of the fun! Until you're committed to an institution, that is.