15

I notice that on Sierra, Siri's voice is much superior to the selection of system voices you can select in System Preferences → Accessibility → Speech. In fact, I suspect they use a different system entirely as the command say -v ? doesn't seem to list any voices which are used with Siri.

I have a key command set up to speak the select text. Is there no way I can get it to use Siri's voice to do it?

Edit: To be specific, I'm after the Siri voice: 'British (Male)'

1
  • 3
    The name of the voice appears to be Arthur. If you go to /System/Library/Speech/Voices, you can see some of the voices there are specifically for Siri. I have: AaronSiri.SpeechVoice, ArthurSiri.SpeechVoice, YelenaSiri.SpeechVoice. say -v doesn't recognize them and their Info.plist differs from that of the normal voices. Although, they do include the same demo text string as the system voices so they were probably intended to be used as such at some point.
    – Nikita
    Sep 23, 2016 at 0:56

3 Answers 3

1

I believe Daniel is the British Siri from the -v list

2
  • You are incorrect, they're clearly different voices.
    – Robert
    Mar 27, 2020 at 20:11
  • 1
    The British voice was updated a couple of times, but the original if you look up videos sounds exactly like Daniel.
    – Pete
    Mar 27, 2020 at 20:18
1

On Mac OS Big Sur and newer, using "Say" without a specific voice specified will use your default system voice.

So, the easiest option is to simply remove the "using" or "with" part from your AppleScript, and then the default voice you have set under Accessibility -> Spoken Content -> System Voice will be used.

For example, this will speak "This is a message with the default voice" in the default system voice.

say "This is a message with the default voice"

Will speak using whatever voice you have specified - which includes options available for "Siri" . You can download additional voices (including the "Enhanced Siri" option which is higher quality) under the "Manage Voices" button.

0

The name of Siri's original voice is called "Samantha" in OS X/macOS.

You can use it using

say "hello" using Samantha with AppleScript (script editor.app).

4
  • I probably should have specified the exact voice I was after in my question, as I didn't check to see if the other ones were available as system voices, but it's the 'British (Male)' one (the only male British voices available as system voices are Daniel and Oliver, both of which seem to be much lower quality).
    – Robert
    Sep 22, 2016 at 19:00
  • How does this answer the OP's question regarding how to set the Siri voice, whatever that voice is set to, as the voice for dictation when selecting text?
    – fsb
    Sep 22, 2016 at 19:02
  • 1
    @Robert 'Daniel' is the Siri's original male British voice (iOS 7) ( youtube.com/… ). Are you looking for the current version of the male British Siri voice?
    – oa-
    Sep 22, 2016 at 20:32
  • Yeah, the new one (on Sierra) is much higher quality.
    – Robert
    Sep 22, 2016 at 20:34

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .