Most read with a twangy, charmingly Norwegian accent-but some of the newest voices (like Alex, Jill, Samantha, and Tom) sound scarily like a professional human voice-over artist. Another way to have the computer read aloud a selection of text is to copy and paste the text you want to hear into a blank TextEdit document. It can speak in your choice of dozens of synthesizer voices, ages 8 to 50. Listen at Any Speed Our high-quality AI voices can read 4. Are you ever too busy to read every word of an email or a word document Would you ever like to hear a paper youve written proofread out loud back to you You. Truth is, the Mac can read almost anything you like: text you pass your cursor over, alert messages, menus, and any text document in any program. Letters from loved ones Scan them and turn them into audible notes. OS X’s Chess and Calculator programs can talk back, too.īut that’s kid stuff. You can add a Speak command in FileMaker Pro scripts. How cool is that? Your Mac can read your email or a web article to you while you’re getting dressed. Hear selected text read aloud On the Apple menu, click System Preferences. (Note: You may need to download another voice to suit. Just right-click (or two-finger click) inside a window full of text and, from the pop-up menu, choose Speech→Start Speaking. Toggle on Speak Screen and scroll down the page to pick a choice in Voices, as well as a speaking rate. Most Apple programs have a Start Speaking command built right in: Safari, Mail, TextEdit, Messages, Stickies, Pages, and so on.

For more on the spoken commands thing, see Dictation. For details on OS X’s dictation feature, see Case Swapping. Its abilities fall into three categories: typing out what you say, reading text aloud using a synthesized voice, and obeying spoken commands. As you may have noticed, OS X is quite talented when it comes to speech.

Mac read text aloud