When you digitize books, documents or objects, both hands are usually busy — holding a page flat, aligning a sheet, steadying a spine. Reaching for the keyboard to release the shutter breaks the rhythm and can shift the object. This small script removes that step: you say “Capture One focus” and the camera focuses, then “Capture One take a photo” and it fires.

It runs in a Terminal window on the Mac next to Capture One and listens through the microphone. It recognizes a few fixed phrases: “Capture One focus” for autofocus, and “Capture One take a photo” or “Capture One shoot” for the shutter. When it hears one, it presses the keyboard shortcut you have assigned to the matching command in Capture One (“Start/Stop Camera Autofocus” or “Capture”) — exactly as if you had pressed it yourself, so Capture One and the tethered camera behave as usual. Say “focus”, let the camera settle, then “take a photo”. A short tick confirms the focus, a bright chime the release, a low tone reports an error. The phrases are several words long on purpose: a single “shoot” would trigger by accident in ordinary conversation in the workspace.

Everything happens on the computer. There is no cloud service, no account and no internet connection while it runs; no audio leaves the computer. The speech recognition is Vosk with a small speech model (about 45 MB, downloaded once during setup). It is deliberately not a voice assistant: it understands two instructions, focus and release, and nothing else, which keeps it fast (under a second) and predictable.

Requirements and limits

• macOS, and Capture One (Pro or CH) with working tethered capture
• Python 3.10 or newer, and a few minutes for setup, including assigning two shortcuts in Capture One
• English phrases by default. German is supported too, and any other language works by swapping in a Vosk model and changing the phrases (described in the README)
• Autofocus over a tethered connection is not available on every camera or lens; if the AF button in Capture One’s Camera Focus tool is greyed out, the voice command cannot focus either. Releasing the shutter is unaffected
• The first launch may trigger macOS’s “unidentified developer” warning, as with any downloaded script. The README explains the one-line fix; the source is short and can be read beforehand
• Tested on macOS only. The Windows part of the code is untested

Download

Download ZIP · Source and instructions on GitHub · Deutsche Anleitung · MIT license, free to use and adapt

Independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Capture One A/S. It contains no Capture One code and changes nothing inside the application; it only sends a keyboard shortcut, like a foot pedal or a macro pad would.