Controlling FCPX via speech commands in Lion OSX

It might not be the Minority Report 'air GUI' but you can control a lot of the features within Final Cut Pro X with just your voice. Could you do a complete edit without having to touch the keyboard?

If you've used FCP for a while, the chances are you've turned on the VoiceOver tool in Universal Access by mistake and had Fred or Victoria read out an instruction to you. The speech integration in OSX goers further than that, it's a two way trip.

A few years ago we looked at controlling FCP with the built in speech recognition features found in the OS. If you want to activate it, go to the Speech panel in System Preferences and toggle speakable items on. You should see that round icon with a microphone float on top of your windows as above.

With the FCP7/Snow Leopard combination, control seemed to be a bit limited, access being restricted to the menu items only. The dropdown menu that contains the custom commands for applications would empty once FCP became the front window.

So with a fresh install of Lion, we decided to have another look, this time with FCPX.