You can make your Mac talk to you in various different ways and even speaking with different voices, all by using the powerful built-in Text-to-Speech abilities of Mac OS X. With this, you can either speak a few words, phrases, or even an entire document. Cepstral® Voices *NOTE: Cepstral Voices are available for Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, Linux, and Mac OSX* Exciting new voices from Cepstral® are now available for only $29.99 each.

MacOS text/speech FAQ: What do you know about Mac OS X text to speech voice capabilities, including using AppleScript to convert text to speech? Excel for mac wont edit text. I’m goofing around currently, using the very cool Mac text to speech capability. Okay, really, what I’m doing is writing an program to wake me up in the morning, and in the process I started digging into this Mac text to speech stuff, using AppleScript. Mac OS X text to speech using AppleScript As I started digging into the Mac text to speech capability I learned that there are a number of voices built into Mac OS/X, which is very cool. If you ever want to use this text-to-speech functionality, here's a list of the voices built into the system: # new on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Alex # all these voices are available on Mac OS X 10.5 # good female voices Agnes Kathy Princess Vicki Victoria # good male voices Bruce Fred Junior Ralph # other voices Albert Bad News Bahh Bells Boing Bubbles Cellos Deranged Good News Hysterical Pipe Organ Trinoids Whisper Zarvox 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. You can keep changing the System Voice and clicking the Play button to here samples of what each voice sounds like. Mac text to speech AppleScript example As part of my AppleScript alarm clock programming effort, I'm starting my 'wake up' effort with some computer voices.

Here's what the first part of my AppleScript program looks like: say 'Good morning Al.' Using 'Whisper' delay 2 say 'Al, it's time to rise and shine.' Using 'Fred' delay 1 say 'The current time is' using 'Vicky' say (time string of (current date)) using 'Vicky' delay 2 say 'Wake up sleepy head' using 'Trinoids' delay 2 say 'You asked us to wake you up at this time.' Using 'Victoria' delay 2 say 'It's time to wake up, it's time to wake up!'