Filed under: Mac 101
Mac 101: Make any text speak to you
Have you ever wished your Mac could read a long text document to you? Well, with the speech service, you can easily have your Mac read as much or as little text as you want. While in Safari, TextEdit, Pages, and other applications; select the text you want to be read, then click the application name in the menu bar. Go to Services > Speech > Start Speaking Text. Your Mac will then use the default voice to read the text. It will continue reading until it reaches the end of the selected text, or you can select Services > Speech > Stop Speaking to end it immediately.
You can change the default voice by opening System Preferences (Apple menu > System Preferences) and going to Speech > Text to Speech. Once there, select a voice from the drop-down "System Voice" menu.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Andrew said 1:33PM on 11-20-2008
You can have a lot of fun by opening up a Terminal window and by typing:
say Some Sentence
Where "Some Sentence" is replaced by whatever you want it to say.
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YodaMac said 1:58PM on 11-20-2008
Cool. I just had my Mac read me your article about Macs reading text. :)
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zldaphreek said 2:05PM on 11-20-2008
This makes reading out of the digital college text books a breeze!
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Jack Palkens said 2:12PM on 11-20-2008
Correction: you should actually be able to do it in any program, you just have to highlight some text, then go to Services>etc.
Just a thought ;)
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joshua smith said 2:57PM on 11-20-2008
How can I make this a shortcut??
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Avinash Vakil said 4:32PM on 11-20-2008
Just use a free app called Service Scrubber. It lets you add and remove service menu items. It also lets you set or change their keyboard shortcuts.
Scott said 4:53PM on 11-20-2008
It only appears in the Services menu for certain applications. For instance, it doesn't show up for Firefox. BUT there is a solution that will work everywhere. In the Speech system preferences, use "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" to assign it to a keystroke (I think it must be a Ctrl, Command, Option, or Shift key combo). Then, in literally ANY app, just highlight the text and press your special key. To stop the voice, press it again.
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Udo said 4:55PM on 11-20-2008
I'm sort of amazed that computer synthesized speech hasn't really gotten better since I bought my first Commodore Amiga back in the day... :-(
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adamdoesmovies said 5:25PM on 11-20-2008
Macintosh speech has remained about the same since I was a kid- I remember being 12 and getting a powerPC to yell FUCKSHITDAMN! in the computer lab. Those were the times.
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modelmotion said 6:25PM on 11-20-2008
i would like to put a button into my safari menu bar that would make my mac just read the highlighted text since i use this feature to read everything.
How can I do that?
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Shunnabunich said 7:28AM on 11-21-2008
You can do this with an AppleScript if you turn on the Script menu (and turning on GUI scripting, if it isn't already on) using AppleScript Utility. You can also bring the relevant menu item closer by having it "Show application scripts at" •top". It's not the most elegant solution, but it does put the desired command only one menu deep on the menu bar.
Once those settings are made, open up Script Editor and enter the following script, starting new lines for the "tells", the "click" and the "end tell":
tell application "Safari" to activate
tell application "System Events"
click menu item "Start Speaking Text" in menu "Speech" of menu item "Speech" in menu "Services" of menu item "Services" in menu 1 of menu bar item 2 in menu bar 1 of process "Safari"
end tell
Do a "Save As" on this script, but leave the sheet open for the time being. Now, switch back to Safari, click on the Script menu, go to "Open Scripts Folder" and select "Open Safari Scripts Folder". You can then drag the folder icon from the titlebar of the Finder window that appears onto the open Save As sheet (it beats navigating through the folders to find it yourself). Save your script in that folder, as "Speak Selection" or whatever you want.
You should now be able to select some text in Safari, click your new script in the Script menu, and hear your Mac read the selected text back to you. Hope that helps!
ZeteBoy said 7:08PM on 11-20-2008
Running Firefox under Tiger. the commands are greyed out.
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krismohr said 11:02PM on 11-20-2008
I'd like to be able to use this feature to verify numbers that I've typed into a web form or a spreadsheet, but something like 7,654,321 comes out as "seven million, six hundred fifty four thousand, three hundred twenty one." I'd like to hear each digit pronounced individually so that I can verify it in the spreadsheet visually as I hear it. Is there a way to do this?
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Rod said 11:17PM on 11-20-2008
Highlight the desired text and press command+option+X.
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Rod said 11:24PM on 11-20-2008
I should add that you can use any key combination you like by setting it up in the speech preference pane.
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Robsky said 2:17AM on 11-21-2008
To get a radiohead performance live from your mac, pick fred as voice with a normal speaking rate. Then let him read http://www.greenplastic.com/lyrics/fitterhappier.php
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khalil amar said 12:06PM on 11-21-2008
Remember when 10.5 was demoed? Steve Jobs demoed a small application developed in-house and he has shown to everybody how reading improved on 10.5 with many voices. though on the released 10.5 it has only one voice that is OK for reading.
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Tommy Peters said 9:25AM on 11-26-2008
Thanks Rod.
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