- #Better option for mac os text to speech how to
- #Better option for mac os text to speech mac os x
- #Better option for mac os text to speech install
- #Better option for mac os text to speech full
It could be frustrating to always be accompanied by a talking voice from your laptop - that’s why it’s important to know how to switch it off. So if your Mac has suddenly started talking to you, it might be a sign that you’ve turned on VoiceOver by mistake. And, after a few minutes, you might want to switch it off. Besides, the VoiceOver app is able to provide a verbal description of videos you watch on your Mac (not available for all videos).Īlthough this text-to-speech audio functionality can be quite handy, you would probably only need it for very occasional tasks you do on your Mac.
#Better option for mac os text to speech full
It’s also fairly robust and can be utilized to its full advantage with in-depth training and different audio voices. In particular, Australian voice "Lee" makes my MacBook Pro sound like a bloke worth taking down to the pub for a pint, and that's a feature definitely worth having.VoiceOver for Mac is a truly useful reader program that lets you use your keyboard to read out the text on the screen. That said, many of the new voices sound natural enough that having my Mac "talk" to me is now a useful feature, even though I don't have any accessibility requirements that make them necessary as they are for some users. The new voices aren't perfect and don't fill every dialectical niche (Richard Gaywood was dismayed there was no "Welsh English" voice, and I'm having to make do with Australian Lee rather than a full-fledged "Kiwi English" voice). I've generally shied away from utilizing OS X's text-to-speech functions in the past, because even "Alex" sounded jarringly artificial to me. If your bandwidth or hard drive space are limited, I wouldn't recommend downloading more than a few of these voices. You'll find this alert welcome, because these high-quality voice files are huge, generally in the neighborhood of 350 to 500 MB each. Selecting a checkbox next to a voice and clicking "OK" will present an alert asking if you're sure you want to download the voice. In particular, the Australian English "Lee" voice (now my default) and Mexican Spanish "Javier" sound incredibly lifelike to my ears. (You can also listen to previews of these voices at NextUp.) Most of these new voices sound astonishingly natural, especially compared to the old, robotic, pre-Alex voices that were the bread and butter of text-to-speech in OS X's distant past. Clicking on "Customize" gives you access to the plethora of new optional voices, and you can play previews of each one before downloading them.
This will likely be set to "Alex" by default. In the Speech pane of System Preferences, clicking on the Text to Speech tab gives you an option for "System Voice" in a pulldown menu.
#Better option for mac os text to speech install
It's also a bit of a misnomer to say they're "included" with OS X, as they are not included in the standard Lion install and require a separate download. Like a few other features of OS X Lion, Apple hasn't made these new voices easily discoverable unless you know where to look for them.
Text-to-speech voices are now available in Arabic, three different Chinese dialects, Czech, Danish, two varieties of Dutch, Finnish, two French dialects, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, two Portuguese dialects, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, two Spanish dialects, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. These new voices, sourced from Nuance, are not only available in several dialects of English but also, in an OS X first, in several other languages. While Alex was a breakthrough for text-to-speech Mac voices at the time, the over 50 new voices included in Lion outmatch him in several key ways.
#Better option for mac os text to speech mac os x
The last major addition to Apple's built-in OS X voices was Alex, a higher-quality voice included in Mac OS X Leopard back in 2007. First announced in March, then found in developer previews, one of the little-heralded new features of OS X Lion is its inclusion of several high-quality text-to-speech voices in 22 different languages.
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