If you don’t want spoken content highlighted, choose None from the Highlight Content pop-up menu. Click the Word Color and Sentence Color pop-up menus to choose the highlight color. Highlight Content: Click the pop-up menu, then choose to have words, sentences, or both highlighted as your Mac speaks. For example, press the Option and Tab keys together to set the keyboard shortcut as Option+Tab. Keyboard Shortcut: Press the key combination you want to use. To set a different keyboard shortcut and change other settings, click the Info button next to “Speak selection”: (You may need to scroll down.)īy default, your Mac speaks text when you press the keyboard shortcut Option-Esc. On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Accessibility in the sidebar. Get started with accessibility features.Use Sign in with Apple for apps and websites.Watch and listen together with SharePlay.Share and collaborate on files and folders.Sync music, books, and more between devices.Make and receive phone calls on your Mac.Use one keyboard and mouse to control Mac and iPad.Use Live Text to interact with text in a photo.Make it easier to see what’s on the screen.Install and reinstall apps from the App Store.To generate a wave format output file run say 'Hello World' -o out. Here is the outcome on Max OS X 10.7.5 3gp2 3GPP-2 Audio (.3g2) ģgpp 3GP Audio (.3gp) ĪIFC AIFC (.) Īdts AAC ADTS (.aac.adts) Ĭaff CAF (.caf) To see the list of output file format available run say -file-format=?.

To change the output file format, just change the output file extension. There are couple of other voices which can be downloaded from Apple’s web site. Here is the default list on Mac OS X 10.7.5 at the time of writing this article. To see the list of voices available on your system run say -v ?. Voice Alex is one of the most popular voices and you can use it if you don’t want to spend too much time on trying other voices. Outcome: mac-text-to-speech-tts-demo-victoria.aiff Outcome: mac-text-to-speech-tts-demo-bruce.aiff Outcome: mac-text-to-speech-tts-demo-alex.aiff Say -v Alex 'Using Text to Speech (TTS), you can have Alex and other Mac voices speak selected text so you can hear a word as you see it onscreen.' -o mac-text-to-speech-tts-demo-alex.aiff Here is sample output for text “Using Text to Speech (TTS), you can have Alex and other Mac voices speak selected text so you can hear a word as you see it onscreen.” using various voices:

Using say with voice Alex and output audio to a file (default format aiff):.

In case you need bigger pause repeat comma e.g.

Use say to pronounce “Hello world” with default voice:.This is pretty handy to generate audio file given the text. It also lets to generate an audio file in various formats and voices. Mac lets you convert text to speech using command line utility “say”.

Mac os x speech to text