You can experiment with these voices on your Mac OS X system by choosing System Preferences, Speech, then clicking the 'Text to Speech' tab. Now choose a value for the System Voice, and then press the Play button. To change your computer's Text to Speech voice: Select the Apple icon on the top left corner of the screen and select 'System Preferences.' Choose the Speech and Dictation option, and from the speech tab select the voice you wish to use. Mac OS X voices CereVoice text-to-speech v4.0 is available for Apple Mac OS X, bringing CereProc's high-quality voices to computers running Apple's OS X: 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.9 Mavericks, 10.10 Yosemite, 10.11 El Capitan and 10.12 Sierra. To change your computer's Text to Speech voice: Select the Apple icon on the top left corner of the screen and select 'System Preferences.' Choose the Speech and Dictation option, and from the speech tab select the voice you wish to use.
Thanks to Siri on the iPhone 4S, people are quickly getting used to hearing gadgets talk. Your Mac can talk, too. For using your Mac everyday, there’s VoiceOver, which is designed for people who are blind or have low vision. If that’s more talking from your Mac than you need, you can use the Mac’s Text to Speech feature, where the Mac reads selected text. It can be handy to use in a presentation, or, if you use an app to record your Mac’s audio, you can create sound clips to use in videos or audio recordings.
The default voice that your Mac uses for Text to Speech actually has a name: Alex. He has a pleasing tone and a certain warmth, but you have other choices if you're looking for something else. There’s Victoria, who’s the female equivalent of Alex; and Bruce and Katy, who are more robotic. Lion and Snow Leopard show a total of six voices available, but there are plenty more to choose from. In this how-to, you will learn how to change the system voice, as well as add new voices.
Step 1: Activate Text to Speech
To have your Mac read selected text out loud, go to System Preferences and open Speech; then under the Text to Speech tab, check the box for Speak Selected Text When the Key is Pressed. The default key combination in Lion is Option+Esc, but you can change it by clicking the Change Key button. In Snow Leopard, you have to define a key combination.
Now whenever you want the Mac to read something out loud, you just select the text and press the key combo. You can, for example, have your Mac read an email as you settle in after arriving to work.
Step 2: Change the voice
Sure, Alex sounds like a nice guy, but he won’t be offended if you want a change. Still in the Text to Speech tab of the Speech system preference, click on the System Voice pop-up menu. You’ll see the voices, divided by gender. (In Lion, the female voices are listed first. In Snow Leopard, the male voices are first.) To see what each one sounds like, select it, and then click the Play button. You can use the slider bar to adjust the Speaking Rate.
If you like one of the six voices, select it, adjust the Speaking Rate (if you want), close the window, and you’re done. If you aren’t satisfied with one of the six, you can add more voices.
Step 3: Add new voices
In the System Voice pop-up menu used in step 2, select Customize (or Show More Voices if you’re using Snow Leopard) at the bottom of the menu. In Lion, a new window will appear, with a list of different voices. Many are designed for use with a particular language, such as German, Japanese, Arabic, Korean, or even South African English, and those voices will read American English with the inflections of the language it is designed for. To sample a voice, check its box and click on the Play button. Check the boxes of the voices you want, and then click OK. The OS will need to download the voice, so you’ll be asked to confirm that you want to install it. If you click Install in the confirmation window, the Apple Licensing Agreement will appear. You’ll need to agree to it to proceed.
In Snow Leopard, after you select Show More Voices, you need to open the System Voice pop-up menu again. You’ll notice that the list has expanded. To sample a voice, you need to select it, and then click on the Play button in the Text to Speech tab of the Speech preference. Unfortunately, you don’t get the language choices that are available in Lion.
Lion users: If you want a Siri-like voice on your Mac, install Samantha, located in the English (United States) Female section. Samantha doesn’t sound exactly like Siri, but it’s close. If you adjust the speaking rate, you can get closer to a Siri sound-alike. Snow Leopard doesn't have Samantha or another Siri-like voice.
Step 4: Talk talk
Once you’re done adding new voices and you’ve found one you like, select it, adjust the Speaking Rate if you want, and then close the Speech preference window. You’re done.
When you want to use Text to Speech, select the text and press the key combo you defined in step 1. Some apps, such as TextEdit, have text-to-speech built in, so you can use the app’s menu command instead. (It's Edit -> Speech -> Start Speaking in TextEdit.)
[Samantha was a key contributor to Macworld senior editor Roman Loyola’s performance in the Macworld Pundit Showdown XIII.]
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Add Voices To Mac Text To Speech
10.7: Install the new voices | 15 comments | Create New Account
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My question is how do I remove the voices I don't want when I'm done playing with them?
Don't install them if you don't want them..
You must work at an Apple Genius Bar.
You could try restoring from Time Machine -- but you need to know where they are -- thanks to the other commenters.
I'm looking on 10.7 and voices can be found here:
/System/Library/Speech/Voices/ You should find a folder named <VoiceName>.SpeechVoice. Simply delete this folder (it will require your local admin username and password, the folder is Read-only) I'm going to take a guess the downloadable ones will end up in the same place. I'm downloading a couple now and will report back once they are installed.
Confirmed. After downloading the Australian voice Karen, there was now a new folder named: Karen.SpeechVoice in the /System/Library/Speech/Voices/ folder, and when I removed that file, the option for that voice was not present in the voice options within text-to-speech in system preferences.
The same is true, if you were to download the file elsewhere, you can move the <VoiceName>.SpeechVoice folder into /System/Library/Speech/Voices/ and then the new voice should be available (if System Preferences was open you'll want to quit and relaunch it).
How about some favorite voices folks?
WARNING: Selecting all of them will initiate at 20 Gig download through software update (at least thats what the warning says that give you the option to hit 'not now').
Microsoft word for mac text box. I downloaded two voices, Ting-Ting (Chinese) and Milena (Russian).
The download was 1.1 GB. When I try to enable them to do something useful, I get the error message, 'The selected voice does not speak the current system language.' It seems that these voices will only work for announcing the time. Whee. Thanks to the other comments, I'm going to delete these. Word For Mac Text To Speech
Hi, two questions:
Firstly, how do I find the System Library (I'm trying to reinstall for my old SL 'You've got mail' alert sound which has disappeared.) Secondly, I tried to install one of the new voices, and did exactly what was outlined in this thread, but I get a message saying that the voice can't be downloaded because I'm not connected to the internet. Obviously, I am, so what's going on? Regards, M.
Yeah, I would say 'huge' is the appropriate word. I updated Reposado to deal with Lion updates and started syncing them. That was two full days ago and it is still going strong--it's doing the voices in alphabetical order by country code, and we're only up to Norway as I write this.
If my ISP implements a bandwidth cap after this, it's probably going to be named after me.
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Need Mac support for a business in the Philadelphia, PA metro area? Contact me.
Here is a Lion Cocoa-Applescript Applet to demo all your installed voices. For each voice it puts up a dialog with information about gender, age and locale then speaks the voice's demonstration text. The dialog automatically OK's after 5 seconds. Click Cancel to stop. Tried this script, but when I ran it I got the error
This script uses new Applescript capabilities only available in Lion. To run it create a new script in Script Editor by chosing menu File -> New From Template -> Cocoa-Applescript Applet then replace all text with the following: class 'NSSpeechSynthesizer' doesn't understand the availableVoices message.
Xcode API docs say this message does exist in NSSpeechSynthesizer and invokes a parameterless class method, which seems right, and messing with the syntax in Script Editor didn't improve things, so I can't see what might be wrong.
I have installed some voices, but when I'm trying to use them the system sound of error plays and they are disappearing from the drop-down menu..
I can use Alex' voice only.. In my log appears something like that: 29/07/11 21:55:40,367 System Preferences: NSSpeechSynthesizer: [NSSpeechSynthesizer attributesForVoice:] - Voice identifier com.apple.speech.synthesis.voice.fiona.premium not found. 29/07/11 20:26:18,057 [0x0-0x116116].com.apple.systempreferences: 0a6cfc0 </System/Library/Speech/Voices/Yannick.SpeechVoice> (not loaded) Thank you all for any suggestions!
I initially only had the U.S. English voices (Jill and Samantha) available for download. This is a new machine that came with Lion installed, which may the relevant factor. After going to the Language & Text Preferences pane and adding British English to the top of the list under Language (using the Edit List button), all of the other voices (including other languages) are now available for download. Note that British English (or, presumably, some other language) must be at the very top of the languages list, above 'English' (or presumably, whatever your default language is) for this to work.
I use this script within the app Read4Me to help install the voices.. ------ cut here ----
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