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‌The Synthia Window

Open Synthia from inside SynthEyes with the IA button on the toolbar at top right, or on the Window menu. Or, you can start Synthia first: it's a separate program from SynthEyes.

The chat-style interface consists only of a text input box for you to enter commands, a Send button, and a text output box showing your commands and Synthia’s output.

Operation is simple: type a command, hit the enter key or click the Send button, then see something happen in Synthia’s output window or SynthEyes itself, and/or hear Synthia’s verbal response.

Synthia works almost exclusively with lower-case text; there is usually no need to capitalize anything. When you see text between back quotes, that is a text string to be taken literally, where capitalization and white space matter exactly ( click the `Go!` button — though you could just say go!).

You can flip through earlier commands using control-up-arrow and control-down- arrow (or with phrases such as retrieve command 32)

OS X Note : Apple's notebook computers commandeer control-up-arrow and control-down-arrow for Mission Control. That's unnecessary since F3 and control-F3 already do the same things. To return control-up/down-arrow to Synthia, open OS X's Settings, click on Keyboard, then on the Shortcuts tab, then on Mission Control in the left-hand column. Uncheck the boxes for "Mission Control" and "Application windows", which are set to control-up- arrow and control-down-arrow.

The Synthia window will generally stay on top of all other windows, since it needs to stay on top of SynthEyes at all times to be usable. Clicking the usual close icon on Synthia will hide it; you can get it back by clicking it in the Taskbar/Dock or by clicking the IA button again. To truly exit from Synthia, say exit. If you say quit or shut down (with variations), both Synthia and SynthEyes will close.

There is a small right-click menu on the IA button in SynthEyes to give handy access to some Synthia actions.

Exercise: look at the right-click menu.

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