Apple’s text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities have been around for some time. You’ll find Dictation under the Keyboard settings in System Settings and the ability to have your Mac read things to you Under Voice Control in the Accessibility settings. But, it turns out you can also make your Mac talk to you via Terminal.
While many Mac users see the Terminal as an impenetrable, technical tool, it can also be very useful, or even fun.
Try this.
- Launch the Terminal. It’s in Applications | Utilities folder.
- Type the following:
say Hello. I’m your MacA couple of seconds later, your Mac will say those words.
To make this even more fun, you can change the voices. Your Mac has access to around 100 different voices although not all are automatically downloaded to your Mac. Some of the voices are quite corporate while there are also novelty voices.
For example you can try
say -v Zarvox Hello. I’m your MacOr
say -v Moira Hello. I’m your MacIf you go to System Settings |Accessibility | Live Speech and click on the Voice dropdown you’ll see the list of available voices. If you click the ‘i” adjacent to the dropdown list you’ll see a list of all the voices troy can also download.
Just type the voice name after the ‘v’ in the command above and you’ll hear it.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.