Inserting a pause in a spoken dialog

Question

How can I pause the finder while it is reading a dialog using the "say" command. For example:
tell application "Finder"
say "I want the script to read some instructions and then pause for a second or two."
--pause here
say "Then continue to read something else here."
end tell
pedro
G5   Mac OS X (10.3.8)  

Answer 1

That's cool, I'd completely forgotten about that. I wouldn't expect anyone to have speech recog on though, and the feedback window could be pretty distracting. I played around with it a bit to see if AS could be made to do it without recog on, or with it in the background. Suspiciously, when I used System Events to force minimize the feedback window to the dock, suddenly the without waiting until completion parameter no longer functioned, even though Speakable Items was turned on! Odd. I tried various other methods of hiding the feedback windows with System Events, but the only thing that worked was relocating the windows off screen as soon as they appeared, and then relocating back at the end of the script.
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">activate application "SpeakableItems"
hide(true)
tell me to activate
set the_text to "AppleScript is a scripting system that allows you to directly control Macintosh applications,
including the Mac OS itself. Instead of using a mouse, keyboard, or other input device
to manipulate menus, buttons, and other interface items,
you can create sets of written instructions--known as scripts--
to automate repetitive tasks, customize applications, and even control complex workflows."
set a_msg to ""
repeat with a_line in (paragraphs of the_text)
say a_line without waiting until completion
hide(true)
set a_msg to a_msg & space & a_line's contents
display dialog a_msg giving up after (count characters of a_line's contents) / 10 buttons {""} cancel button 1
end repeat
hide(false)
quit application "SpeakableItems"
on hide(switch)
tell application "System Events" to tell windows of process "Speech Feedback Server" to if switch then
set position to {0, -100}
else
set position to {0, 0}
end if
end hide</pre>While this does work, for what it does I think I'd still prefer the shell script. Launching the entire speech recognition system just to simulate a dialog behavior is overkill. It's not going to be more compatible with earlier versions of Mac OS than the shell script. The code, while somewhat cleaner looking for the scripter, offers no added benefit to the end user. It was a fun exercise though, thanks for the idea.
PowerMac G5 (June 2004) 2x1.8GHz 1.25GB, PowerBook G4 (12-inch DVI) 1x1GHz 768MB   Mac OS X (10.4.3)