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Are there voices in different languages installed in Mac OS X? E.g. spanish, french or slovak? (latest iPod Nano built-in voiceover has beautiful slovak voice, I'd like to try it on Mac OS X too)

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  • There are a lot new voices in 10.7 (e.g. the Danish one I've been playing with). – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jul 25 '11 at 14:54
  • @Thorbjørn: that's right, and that's what I've said in my answer as well. High-quality voices for "free", what's not to like? – Peter Štibraný Jul 25 '11 at 15:35
  • Peter, consider accepting one of the original answers and add a note to your question instead of adding an answer much later and accepting that. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jul 25 '11 at 15:46
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    @Thorbjørn: until today, Martins answer was the accepted one. But I don't think it's the best one today. I don't think that changing accepted answer is the wrong practice, but I may reconsider this position. – Peter Štibraný Jul 25 '11 at 17:25
  • See also apple.stackexchange.com/questions/42322/… – Graham Miln Aug 13 '18 at 10:13
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You can use the following command in the Terminal to get a list of all the available voices:

say -v ?

On my system the output looks like this with the voice name followed by the language abbreviation (I removed the comments):

Agnes en_US

Albert en_US

Alex en_US

Alice it_IT

Alva sv_SE

Amelie fr_CA

Anna de_DE

Bad News

Bahh en_US

Bells en_US

Boing en_US

Bruce en_US

Bubbles en_US

Carmit he_IL

Cellos en_US

Damayanti id_ID

Daniel en_GB

Deranged en_US

Diego es_AR

Ellen nl_BE

Fiona en-scotland

Fred en_US

Good News

Hysterical en_US

Ioana ro_RO

Joana pt_PT

Junior en_US

Kanya th_TH

Karen en_AU

Kathy en_US

Kyoko ja_JP

Laura sk_SK

Lekha hi_IN

Luciana pt_BR

Maged ar_SA

Mariska hu_HU

Mei-Jia zh_TW

Melina el_GR

Milena ru_RU

Moira en_IE

Monica es_ES

Nora nb_NO

Paulina es_MX

Pipe Organ

Princess en_US

Ralph en_US

Samantha en_US

Sara da_DK

Satu fi_FI

Sin-ji zh_HK

Tessa en_ZA

Thomas fr_FR

Ting-Ting zh_CN

Trinoids en_US

Veena en_IN

Vicki en_US

Victoria en_US

Whisper en_US

Xander nl_NL

Yelda tr_TR

Yuna ko_KR

Zarvox en_US

Zosia pl_PL

Zuzana cs_CZ

This is an example on how to use say with a german voice, as suggested by scottishwildcat in the comments:

say -v Anna 'Guten Tag!'

In case you want to hear the example list, you can copy this for loop into your terminal, which will result in all installed voices speaking a text example:

say -v \? | while read LINE
 do
  SPEAKER=$(echo $LINE | egrep -o "^[a-zA-Z\-]*[ ]?[A-Z][a-z]+")
  TEXT=$(echo $LINE | egrep -o "#.*" | tr "#" " ")
  echo $SPEAKER
  echo -ne "This is voice $SPEAKER speaking the example text: \n" $TEXT | say -v $SPEAKER
 done
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    Also worth mentioning you can then use "say -v <voicename>" to use one of those voices, without changing the system preference. For example, say -v Whisper "Now I am whispering". – calum_b Mar 4 '16 at 21:36
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    This should be the accepted answer. – letitbee May 24 '16 at 14:04
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    @letitbee maybe the guy who ask the question 6 years ago will come back and delete his answer so he can follow your advice:-) – Tom Gewecke May 25 '16 at 15:17
  • @TomGewecke No doubt my friend, no doubt. That will happen! – letitbee May 26 '16 at 0:49
  • It's say -v \? – Nakilon Apr 26 '18 at 16:25
6

For Mac OS X 10.7, Swedish works pretty well by just downloading the Swedish voices using Preferences->System Voice->Customize and setting either as System Voice. It neatly nails even pretty peculiar Swedish words and spellings.

No guarantee for other languages.

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  • same for german. I just got a bit overboard and downloaded all the voices - they need a huge space on the drive and no documented way of removing them. So maybe just download one by one. – bdecaf Jun 5 '13 at 14:02
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As far as I know the only way to get a Mac to speak in another language is to get voice resources in your target language. A web site for French blind people recommends iVox.

Sorry, no Slovak there I can see.

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  • Thanks for sharing the link to iVox. At least there is czech voice, I'll try it. – Peter Štibraný Oct 31 '10 at 18:34
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Lion has many more voices, including Czech (Zuzana) and Slovak voice (Laura)!

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The voices included in Mac OS X 10.6 are optimized for english only. Even if you set your system language to anything different, it won’t work, because it will try to read with english pronunciation, causing funny wordings. Try saying “Hola” for spanish and you’ll see how it says: “hooola” as an english speaking person would read it.

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2

It might be a bit hard to find the international for OS X Lion, this shows how...

http://www.litebeam.net/litebeam/read4me/voices.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RUI5d5L_wr8

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  • Yes, this. Then if you want to use it from the Terminal, you can write: say -v Laura "Dobrý deň" – mcdado Mar 10 '14 at 12:05

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