Remote Control with an AI Assistant

An AI assistant on your computer can operate VoceVista for you. You say in your own words what you want, and the assistant does the clicking: it opens recordings, selects and plays passages, zooms in, shows and hides parts of the window, opens Settings pages, switches the interface language and takes screenshots. It can also repeat the same steps for many files, which saves a lot of time.

Remote control is available in all editions of VoceVista. Your assistant can use every feature that your edition has.

What you need

You need an AI assistant that runs on your computer and is allowed to run programs there, such as Claude Code. An AI chat in a web browser cannot reach VoceVista.

Your assistant sets up everything else by itself. The remote control tools are written in Python. If Python is not installed on your computer yet, the assistant will tell you and help you install it.

Getting started

  1. Close VoceVista if it is open. Your assistant will start it with remote control turned on.

  2. Copy this request into your assistant. It tells the assistant where to find the instructions for remote control, which are installed with VoceVista:

    Windows
    Please read the file
C:\Program Files\Sygyt Software\VoceVista Pro\RemoteControl\README.md
It explains how you can control VoceVista on this computer. Set this up,
then start VoceVista and tell me which version is running.
    macOS
    Please read the file
/Applications/VoceVista Pro.app/Contents/Resources/RemoteControl/README.md
It explains how you can control VoceVista on this computer. Set this up,
then start VoceVista and tell me which version is running.

    These paths are for VoceVista Pro. For another edition, replace VoceVista Pro with the name of your edition, for example VoceVista Video.

  3. Your assistant reads the instructions and sets itself up. Along the way, it may ask you to allow it to install something or to run a command, and it may ask you to restart it once. Follow its instructions.

  4. When VoceVista has opened and your assistant has told you its version, everything is ready.

If something does not work, tell your assistant what happened. The instructions include a troubleshooting section that it can use.

When VoceVista asks for permission

Before another program can control VoceVista, you are asked whether to allow it, for example:

Allow "python3", started by "Terminal", to control VoceVista Pro?

The question usually names Python, which your assistant uses to control VoceVista. You are not asked when your assistant has started VoceVista itself.

  • Click Allow if you have just asked your assistant to work with VoceVista.

  • Click Don’t Allow if you did not expect the question, or do not know the program it names. That program then cannot control VoceVista until it, or VoceVista, is restarted.

Pressing Return or Esc counts as Don’t Allow, so a key you press while typing in another window cannot let a program in.

Remote control is off when you open VoceVista the usual way. It is only on when VoceVista was started for it, as your assistant does. Only programs on your own computer can connect. Nothing is opened to the network.

What your assistant gets from VoceVista, such as screenshots and file names, becomes part of your conversation with it, just like anything else you share with an AI assistant. Keep this in mind when you work with recordings of other people, such as your students.

On a Mac, macOS may ask questions of its own, which only you can answer:

  • If VoceVista has never been used on this Mac, macOS first asks whether it may use the microphone.

  • For a screenshot of the whole VoceVista window, macOS asks whether the app your assistant runs in (Terminal, for example) may record the screen. Newer macOS versions repeat this question from time to time. Screenshots of the analyzer views, of the Settings window and of dialogs work without this permission.

What you can ask for

Once everything is set up, just say what you want. Here are some examples:

  • Open soprano.wav from my Desktop, select the passage from 1.2 to 2.4 seconds and show me the spectrogram.

  • Zoom in on the passage from 2 to 4 seconds and play it.

  • Open take1.wav and take2.wav, zoom both to the first five seconds, and show me both spectrograms.

  • Open every recording in my folder "Lesson 12" and save a picture of each spectrogram in the same folder.

  • Show the piano, then take a screenshot of the whole window.

  • Make pictures of all Settings pages, in English and in German, for my handout.

  • Open the Analyzer settings and explain the options to me.

  • Turn what you just did into a script, so that I can repeat it next week.

For technical users

The README.md file in the RemoteControl folder is the complete reference. It lists every command, and explains how to start VoceVista for remote control yourself, how to send commands from the command line or from your own Python scripts, how to make reproducible screenshot series, and how to connect other AI assistants through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The tools it describes are in the same folder.