I was searching for ways to use my computer (running Windows XP) at times when I will be holding my 5-month old baby.

Then the thought occurred: What if we can speak to the computer and give commands like “click”, “next”, “explorer” etc? I scoured the net for hours and finally found a good free program called Shoot (portable, requires no installation). Before proceeding further, you might want to look at the video below for an idea on some of the voice activated actions we are going to achieve by the end of this tutorial.

Shoot will basically interpret your voice and look in a XML file for the corresponding phrase. When a match is found, it sends the associated key strokes for that command.

Here are the steps to launch programs and do basic tasks by speaking to your computer:

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Let’s look at two ways of updating your status at Twitter besides navigating to Twitter.com site itself and posting there. In both these methods, the current web page title and the URL (shortened at TinyURL automatically) will get filled in the posting window.

Method 1: Bookmarklet

Add this Twitter now bookmarklet to Chrome’s bookmarks. Simply drag the link to your bookmarks and click on it whenever you want to micro-blog at Twitter.

Method 2: Keyboard shortcut

Press Ctrl+Alt+T.

For this, first install AutoHotKey, then save this ChromeToTwitter.ahk file and run it.

Interested in the code of this .ahk file? here it is:

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The delicious add-on for Firefox lets us select some text on a web page and click on a button to add the page to your online bookmarks at delicious.com. The selected text will then be auto populated in the NOTES field of the bookmarking form. We can achieve a similar functionality in Chrome (or for that matter, any browser with little tweaking).

This post is about a AutoHotKey script using which you can select text on a web page, press a customizable hotkey and submit the page to delicious with NOTES field pre-filled automatically. All you need to do is enter/select the tags and hit Return to submit the form.

Here are the steps:

1. Download and install AutoHotKey if you don’t have it already present on your computer.
2. Download this (for XP) or this (for Vista) small ChromeToDelicious.ahk file (the contained code can be found at the end of this post) and double click on it. You should see a H shaped icon in the system tray. Keep it running.
3. Log into your account at delicious.com.

That’s it!

Now whenever you want to bookmark a page (Example: http://chromespot.com/) to your delicious, highlight some relevant text on the page

and press one of the default hotkeys Ctrl+Shift+B or Ctrl+Shift+D (you can change these by editing the script and reloading it) and a window pop up like this will appear:

The code:

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Our coverage of productivity tips on Google Chrome continues. In this article, we shall see how to set a keyboard shortcut that will automate the steps of focusing the address bar, pasting the copied URL and hitting Go.

Keyboard shortcuts that the script provides:

• Win+v – Pastes the URL (should have been already copied) in the address bar and hits return
• Win+Alt+v – Opens a new tab, pastes the URL in the address bar and hits return

Instructions:

1. Download AutoHotKey and install it.
2. Save this small ChromePastenGo.ahk file (the contained code can be found at the bottom of this post) and place it anywhere in your computer. Double click this .ahk file.

That’s it! Next time you see a plain-text non-linked URL in Chrome or in any other program; simply copy it, switch to Chrome and press Win+v or Win+Alt+v.

The code:

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Tab Mix Plus add-on for Firefox has a handy feature where in you can switch to previous and next tabs by scrolling your mouse (with the cursor on tab bar) up and down respectively. We can achieve the same in Google Chrome using AutoHotKey.

1. Download AutoHotKey and install it if you don’t have it already.
2. Save this small ChromeTabsScroll.ahk file (the contained code can be found at the bottom of this post) and place it anywhere in your computer. Double click this .ahk file.
3. You may need to adjust the number in line 12. This is the height of Chrome’s tab bar.

That’s it. Now you can take your mouse over the tab bar at the top of Chrome and turn your mouse wheel forward and backward to switch to previous and next tab.

Content of the ChromeTabsScroll.ahk file:

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