Welcome,
OpenEars performs continuous recognition, meaning that touch events are not used in order to start or stop recognition, but instead there is ongoing listening and you trigger the events of your app based on speech that is recognized.
Please check out the sample app that ships with OpenEars (it’s in the folder OpenEarsSampleApp and is called OpenEarsSampleApp.xcodeproj) in order to see a complete example of an app that performs the major functions you’ve mentioned, or step through the tutorial tool here, which also answers those questions with a step-by-step approach: https://www.politepix.com/openears/tutorial