This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
VoiceOver and Text To Speech for Mac OS X. It is an incredibly realistic voice but there are other options for text to speech voices in Mac. Mac OS has a large number of high quality voices available from Nuance in many languages and dialects. To access these voices do the following. Mac OS X includes many high quality voices for it’s text-to-speech abilities, they’re in a wide variety of languages and accents and are probably some of the best computer rendered voices out there.
GhostReader is an easy to use, fully customizable Text to Speech app that allows you to listen to written text on your Mac. Read selected texts from any other application, import texts in several formats and listen to them on the go. Mac text to speech voices. If you don't like the default Mac text to speech voice, you can change it to other voices. I've written about this in my 'Setting the Mac text to speech default system voice tutorial.' In the end all of the voices still sound computer generated, but the new 'Alex' voice is very good, and I also like the older 'Vicki' voice from time to time. To change the voice of the reader in Mac, please go to System Preferences > Dictation & Speech > Text to Speech. You can change the system voice as well as the speaking rate. You can also test the voice to make sure you like it by pressing “Play” in System Preferences.
Mac Text To Speech OnlineHow To: Adding New Voices For Text To Speech In Mac OS X Lion
As many of you would know Apple has presented text to speech in the Mac OS for many years even pre-dating Mac OS X. Well, with the release of Mac OS X Lion they have expanded on the available voices. Many of the voices are by default not included in the installation and need to be downloaded on request.
The good thing about these additional voices is Apple has not only included a few more novelty voices but they have also included other languages besides English and even other accents within the English Language.
In order to access and download these additional voices simply proceed to the System Preferences and then to the Speech area as highlighted below:
Then, make sure you are in the Text To Speech tab and then click on the system voice to bring down the following drop down menu:
Select ‘Customise’ and the following window will be displayed:
This window displays the voices which are not currently on your system but are available for download.
To play a sample simply highlight one and select play. When you have found a voice you wish to add simply place a tick in the box next to the name as shown in the image above and then press okay and the voice in question will be downloaded through Software Update.
Free Text To Speech Voices
You will be presented with the following message upon request to download:
Mac Text To Speech Voices Download
As you can see you are told the size of the file that will be downloaded. For a voice you may be wondering why is the file size so large.
These new voices are incredibly high quality. You will honestly believe a real person is sitting right next to you when you play them back.
Mac Text To Speech Voices Free
If you still want to install the voice simply press the install button, agree to the license agreement and the download and installation will take place. The new voice will be automatically added and you can select it, once downloaded and installed, without restarting your system.
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December 2020
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