Speakable items is part of the speech recognition feature in the classic Mac OS and macOS operating systems.
Speakable items was first introduced as part of Apple's speech recognition software PlainTalk in 1993.
In OS X Mountain Lion, Speakable Items has been relocated to the Accessibility panel in System Preferences.
If a workflow is saved as an application and put in the Speakable items folder it becomes available to the speech recognition software.
The words the computer will recognize to execute the command will be the name of the saved Automator application.