text-to-speech programme for mac?

September 7, 2005 1:13 PM

any of youse ppls know where i can find an ok text-to-voice thingy on/for a mac? if it is not native to the OS, then any cromulent freeware/open sauce tool would do embiggeningly :)
posted by UbuRoivas to computers & internet (17 comments total)

You can go to the command line and type
say Hello

Where "Hello" is any text you want the computer to speak.
posted by odinsdream at 1:14 PM on September 7, 2005

Regular old TextEdit (even Simpletext) speaks if you just select the text and access the Edit>Speech>Start Speaking command. No software to add.
posted by ernie at 1:17 PM on September 7, 2005

Almost every app will speak for you using "Services". Run up, say, Safari.. select some text, go to the Safari/Application menu, go to Services, go to Speech. There you go. That works in most apps.
posted by wackybrit at 1:18 PM on September 7, 2005

To followup odinsdream's post and what ernie said, you can speak from the clipboard with 'pbpaste | say', and Cocoa applications will be able to invoke the speech engine from the 'Services' menu (under the main application menu).

See also System Preferences -> Speech to change the voice.
posted by edd at 1:21 PM on September 7, 2005

Oh and two more things - to save as a file rather than have it come straight out of the speakers use 'say -o file.aiff'. Also another command line option - 'say -f readmeoutloud.txt' to read out a file.
posted by edd at 1:24 PM on September 7, 2005

handy tips, so far...sorry bout the obviousness of the Q...more a PC user, iSelf...
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:38 PM on September 7, 2005

The full spec for say can be found using man say, and looks something like this in action:

say -f filename -v voice -o output.aiff

So, if you made a file in your home directory called MacBeth.txt, and wanted to have an audio file spoken in the voice of Bruce saved to your desktop, this would be the command:

say -f ~/MacBeth.txt -v Bruce -o ~/Desktop/MacBeth.aiff
posted by odinsdream at 1:48 PM on September 7, 2005 [1 favorite]

For the record: There's a ton of useful stuff in the services menu (A great idea brought over from NeXT, but hardly used these days it seems)
posted by Popular Ethics at 1:52 PM on September 7, 2005

Depending on how much text you want to convert, several online speech applications are accessible from a Mac.

AT&T's text-to-speech software is much more robust than the built-in Mac speech synthesis. The voices sound clearer and the interpreter in general seems smarter. Their demo lets you convert a few sentences at a time, and either speak the results or save to a file.

AT&T Natural Voices
TTS Interactive Demo
posted by Jeff Howard at 1:54 PM on September 7, 2005

IBM has one too!
posted by Popular Ethics at 1:57 PM on September 7, 2005

Ceptral is now releasing stuff for OS X. Their voices are pretty decent and their price point ($30) is tough to beat.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 2:04 PM on September 7, 2005

No one has mentioned it yet, but in OS X all the speech settings are in the System Preferences under Speech. You can try out the voices, set the speed, etc etc.
posted by bcwinters at 2:17 PM on September 7, 2005

Oops, my bad, someone DID mention it. I'm just blind.
posted by bcwinters at 3:29 PM on September 7, 2005

Ok, I'm sure this is REAL DUMB but I tried the IBM demo, and it is for sure worlds better than the mac built in voices. My mom uses OSX text to speech every day and would be thrilled if I got hert better voices- but I couldn't figure out how to purchase either the AT&T or IBM products. Are they marketed to end users?
posted by carterk at 7:20 PM on September 7, 2005

I get the impression that they're marketing to developers. I don't think you can just buy it as shrinkwrapped software for your computer, but you can install it on your server and build your own apps around it.

Part of it is that it's not just better voices, like a skin, but it's how the voice interprets the text. Like the example on AT&Ts site that points out how the abbreviation "Dr" is pronounced differently depending on whether it's a professional title (doctor) or part of an address (drive). OSX doesn't get the latter context right, and Simpletext just pronounces it Drrr.
posted by Jeff Howard at 9:07 PM on September 7, 2005

abbreviation "Dr" is

Interesting. Under Tiger 10.4 selecting the above text and having the Service speak it pronounces it correctly. Hmm
posted by ernie at 10:29 PM on September 7, 2005

Under 10.4, Mac OSX Services pronounces it "doctor," no matter what the context is. That means, if you have an address such as 123 Rodeo Dr., then services pronounces it "One hundred twenty three, rodeo doctor." AT&T Natural voices pronounces it correctly in both contexts.

Try this phrase to see:
My name is Dr. Goodman; my office is at 123 Rodeo Dr.
posted by Jeff Howard at 1:39 PM on September 8, 2005