Help with simple workflow from selected text

[jonteamere]

As a medical student, I come up against a lot of words in my studies that I have no idea how to pronounce. Before Alfred, I would open Safari, go to www.howjsay.com and copy/paste the word into their search bar. With Alfred, I've been able to set up a custom howjsay search that includes that whole {query} replacement thing. I was wondering if there was a way to set up a workflow that makes use of currently selected text to do the same search on howjsay.

 

I thought that maybe instead of using {query} there would be a trigger for selected text, but I haven't been able to find anything.

 

Any thoughts?

 

 

[deanishe]

Grabbing selected text from an arbitrary application doesn't work very well, as there isn't a universal method for doing so.

What you can do is trigger an AppleScript that will do a Copy for you:
 

tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "c" using command down
end tell
set theText to the clipboard as Unicode text

Now the selected text is on the clipboard. It's also in the theText variable if you want to process it further in AppleScript.
 

[Florian]

Is it is helpful in any way, applescript also has a "say" command

[deanishe]

I've just given that a try with the few medical terms I know, and it does a fairly good job, you know…