Trigger Alfred using Siri?

[intafon]

I know this is probably backward from what some people want, and antithetical to parts of the premise of Alfred but hear me out! :-)

 

My wife bought me AirPods which turns out are pretty cool. I paired them with my Mac yesterday while working at home, and realized that one thing that I would really like would be to be able to trigger Alfred using Siri. Why, you ask? 

 

Well, I had wandered off from my computer with the AirPods still in my ears, but had left Google Play Music running in Chrome. I have an Alfred trigger (CMD `) that calls an applescript that finds Google Play in a Chrome tab and toggles the pause/play. I would love to be able to tell Siri to "tell Alfred to press Command `" or "tell Alfred to pause Google Play" or "tell Alfred to invoke [keyword trigger here]" or something like that.

 

Is this something that is already doable and I've just missed it?

[vitor]

You don’t need Alfred to do this, and it wouldn’t be the appropriate tool anyway.

 

Go to System Preferences → Accessibility → Dictation. There you can set voice commands to control macOS. If you want a specific command to control a specific Alfred feature, point the command to an AppleScript that will run Alfred from an External Trigger.

[intafon]

Right, looks like you can set a custom dictation command, which can trigger an Automator workflow (such as applescript).

 

Will have to look into this option further, but I'm not sure how this works with something like AirPods. AirPods has the double tap to invoke Siri feature, which is why I was considering that route. Also, in order for this to work, you have to enable the always on microphone listening part of Dictation, which I'd rather avoid. 

 

Thanks for the tip though, that is a decent starting place!

[vitor]

38 minutes ago, intafon said:

AirPods has the double tap to invoke Siri feature, which is why I was considering that route.

 

If this is a must, then what you ask for cannot be done. Alfred can’t be controlled by Siri because Apple does not allow that integration. There’s nothing Alfred’s team can do in that regard.

[intafon]

Yeh, sure, no problem. I was just asking to see if there was something I wasn't thinking of.

 

I have the Applescript that performs what I want it to do, so I can either a) Create an app bundle with the script that I launch from Alfred, or b) Set up an Applescript bundle/app that calls an external trigger to alfred that executes what I already have set up.

 

In either case, I can use "Launch [app name here" from Siri and that should do the trick. Using the latter option above, I can keep everything still in Alfred and just write a stub app that simply performs the external trigger. At the end of the day "External trigger" was kind of the key I was looking for.