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My typical work day may require me to generate several passwords per day. Up until today, I had been spending a whopping 9 seconds each time I needed to do that. I use 1Password as my password manager and it has a rather nice password generator. Unfortunately, it requires me to lift my hand off the keyboard and move to the track pad. I probably loose a second on either end of this as well.
Well, “several” may be overstating things, but I do it enough times per day that it I can certainly classify it as a repetitive task. Any repetitive task should be able to be automated.
I’ve trimmed that 9 seconds down to .73 seconds. I did this by using Dragon Professional Individual (voice dictation software – no longer supported) and creating a custom command. In a nutshell, I say the phrase ‘new password’ and a random string of characters is copied to my clipboard, ready for pasting into whatever field it needs pasted in.
Behind the scenes the custom command is assigned to a piece of applescript that runs a bash command to generate a random string, copies that random string to to clipboard and then runs another command to delete the password from my clipboard manager’s history. Here’s a demo of what is happening when I say ‘new password’
I like to use applescript because it is modular and I can use the script in several places as a piece of larger automations. One could create a keyboard shortcut to run the script or use it in any number of Automator workflows. I haven’t upgraded to Catalina yet, but I’m assuming you can assign custom commands in the new voice control feature and duplicate this there. Here’s a quick demo of generating a new password via voice command
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