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Filed under: Features, How-tos

Mac Automation: Make your text speak its mind

by Cory Bohon (RSS feed) on Apr 13th, 2009


Have you ever wanted to type something into your Mac and have it record what you typed audibly using any one of the Mac OS X voices? It's easily done with a few Automator actions, and in this Mac Automation post, I'll show you how.

Open Automator and find the following actions, then drag them to the workflow area (in the same order):
  • Get Specified Text
  • Text to Audio File

Running the workflow
With these two actions in place, you can enter text into the Get Specified Text action, and a file name in the Text to Audio File action, and run it with great results. The text that you enter will be magically encoded into audio using the specified voice in the audio file action.

Read on to learn more about saving the workflow, and adding additional options.

Continue reading “Mac Automation: Make your text speak its mind”

Tags: automation, Automator, Mac Automation, MacAutomation, text to speech, TextToSpeech

Filed under: Mac 101

Mac 101: Make any text speak to you

by Cory Bohon (RSS feed) on Nov 20th, 2008

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.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section!

Tags: Mac 101, Mac101, Services, speak, speech, text, text to speech, TextToSpeech

Filed under: Software

GhostReader 1.5: text to audiobook

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on May 20th, 2008

GhostReader is a text to speech application that allows you to have your computer read aloud PDF, Word, and text files and save the output in a variety of formats for importing into iTunes. While Mac OS X does have built-in text to speech capabilities in the Universal Access Preference Pane (VoiceOver), GhostReader adds more voices (including various voices tailored to multiple European languages), allows you to modify how words are pronounced, and automates the conversion to audiobooks.

GhostReader 1.5 is $39.95 for one language; additional languages are extra; a demo is available.

Tags: GhostReader, text to speech, TextToSpeech, voices

Tip of the Day

Holding the Command key (aka the Apple key) and pressing Tab will cycle through your open applications. It's easier to Cmd-Tab if you are Copy (Cmd-C) and Pasting (Cmd-V) to and from various applications.

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