Positioning a camera during laparoscopic and robotic procedures is challenging and essential for successful operations. During surgery, if the camera view is not optimal, surgery becomes more complex and potentially error-prone. To address this need, we have developed a voice interface to an autonomous camera system that can trigger behavioral changes and be more of a partner to the surgeon. Similarly to a human operator, the camera can take cues from the surgeon to help create optimized surgical camera views. It has the advantage of nominal behavior that is helpful in most general cases and has a natural language interface that makes it dynamically customizable and on-demand. It permits the control of a camera with a higher level of abstraction. This paper shows the implementation details and usability of a voice-activated autonomous camera system. A voice activation test on a limited set of practiced key phrases was performed using both online and offline voice recognition systems. The results show an on-average greater than 94% recognition accuracy for the online system and 86% accuracy for the offline system. However, the response time of the online system was greater than 1.5 s, whereas the local system was 0.6 s. This work is a step towards cooperative surgical robots that will effectively partner with human operators to enable more robust surgeries. A video link of the system in operation is provided in this paper.