In this post I'm going to paste an image of a macro I just wrote that sends me an iMessage of any words that are spoken in my house after I leave my house (yes, it actually knows when I leave the house by detecting if my iPhone's hotspot is within range of my Mac.) It currently requires macOS Monterey which means this won't work for anyone here yet so I'll just post an image instead of the macro. The purpose of this is to get people excited about voice detection in Monterey, not to have you run this code yet.
So now when I activate this macro, the instant anyone (including me) says any words near my Mac, as long as my iPhone is off or away from home, the words are sent to me as an iMessage appearing on my iPhone instantly. It takes about 1 second from when I finish saying anything until the text is sent to me by iMessage. That's fast!
Some people have cameras to monitor for thieves. Cameras work quite well and record images which can help catch a thief. Capturing the audio as text isn't really very useful for catching the thief but may be useful for detecting some thieves - at least the ones who talk. I'm not sure how many thieves talk, but I'll bet there are a few. And in any case, voice detection with iMessage is extremely fast. Maybe a combination of these two technologies is the best defence. In addition, maybe you want to hear something inside your house beside thieves, like a babysitter? But I'm not sure about the legality of that. I'm not sure if it constitutes a "recording" or not. It's more like a "transcript." I'm not sure if it's legal, but it's a lot less intrusive than a video or audio recording.
The Monterey voice detection feature works quite well but at the present time it always makes a beep and always displays a window in the middle of the screen. I'm hoping Apple fixes that for official release, but if not, I've got a couple of different ways to fix that. But in order to make this macro simple I'm not including that code here.
Right now it runs the "airport" command every two minutes to see if my iPhone is in range (this code can also be improved, but I'm keeping it simple today.) I'm noticing that the airport command occasionally misses any given network so it may be unreliable, perhaps resulting in an iMessage of yourself talking while your iPhone is still at home.
Hopefully I didn't introduce any bugs as I was adding comments. If it's broken I'll fix it.
I just noticed that two of the statements had to have "Failure aborts macro" disabled: the Send action and the Shortcuts action. The Semaphore statement can just be ignored for today, as it's meant for preventing duplication.