Quite often with a Mac, the stop command is the same as the start command. Try using whatever you assigned for start speaking again to see if you can get the bloody thing to stop. Perhaps that will help you worm your way out of the never-ending dialogue :-)

ChrisL

There’s also command-., the near-universal Mac shortcut to stop anything....

(Yelling obscenities doesn’t work, although it might make you feel better!)

Yes, Linda—I have cursed at that little Microsoft paperclip thingy many a time to no avail. I am glad I never owned a gun, otherwise there would be a very large hole in my computer screen :-)

ChrisL

Chris, wouldn’t it be grand if we could have that little Quark robot fire his ray gun at the Microsoft Paperclip?

Ah, yes! that was the most fun Ester Egg ever :-)

ChrisL

Maybe the Adobe flying saucer (friendly alien) could come in somehow?

On the subject, I accidentally made Photoshop talk, and it went away with the same command it came with. It was hard to remember what caused it though…

“It was hard to remember what caused it though”

I go crazy when things like this happen. The computer is trying to be oh, so helpful and it does something it thinks you want. I wish there were just defaults that did nothing unless you check the box in preferences which says, “I like being annoyed with stupid random interuptions so please turn all stupid stuff on”.

ChrisL

“Quite often with a Mac, the stop command is the same as the start command.”
Nope, in this case it means, Start Over.

“There’s also command-.,...”
That old cure-all, stopped generally working years ago, and does not work here either.

Kind of like some of the leaders of these companies, who would greatly benefit from a “shut-up” command.

Cheers!

“Kind of like some of the leaders of these companies, who would greatly benefit from a “shut-up” command.”

The “shut-up command” could be useful for politicians as well :-)

Sorry it didn’t work for your problem.

ChrisL

You can assign quick keys to anything you see in a menu.

— Open your “System Preferences”
— Open “Keyboard and Mouse”
— Go to “Keyboard Shortcuts”
— Scroll down to “Application Keyboard Shortcuts”
— Select “All Applications”
— Click on the “+”
— A new window appears
— With “All Applications” selected, type “Stop Speaking” (It is important to spell it exactly as it is shown.)
— Assign a keyboard shortcut. For instance, I used cmd-opt-shift y (Note that you should be careful not to assign a quick key combination that is already in use.)
— Click “Add”
— Close “System Preferences”
— Restart your machine.

Ta da!!

I just re-read your thread starter David. Maybe you’ve already tried it this way?

Yes, Linda—I have cursed at that little Microsoft paperclip thingy many a time to no avail.

Um, I think that one is actually easy to hose — can’t remember the how exactly (probably because I did it some time ago!), but I made it go away permanently. Look at the Help file: for once, it actually does something useful. ;-)