The little speakable applications with an ear on the icon are custom applications designed for PlainTalk on PowerMac only. They have no code resource that you would find on a 680x0 application. If launched on a 68K machine, they produce a -192 error (resource not found). You could write similar applications in C, C++, or Pascal that make general toolbox calls or send AppleEvents to perform actions.
The "What time is it?" and "What day is it?" applications perform actions that were similar to the QuicKeys functions supplied with previous versions of PlainTalk using the Speech Macro Editor. You could write similar Applets in AppleScript to perform these functions.
The "Tell me a joke" application picks one of 22 different Knock Knock jokes stored internally. A custom application performs faster than a corresponding AppleScript could, doing the same function.
The "Close window" application operates for any application environment, whether the application is scriptable or not. This function could not be performed across all applications using AppleScript.
The "open Speech Introduction" application simply opens the Guide file and could also be performed in AppleScript using the AGStart Scripting addition.
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