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
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@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
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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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1@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
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See also apple.stackexchange.com/questions/42322/… – Graham Miln Aug 13 '18 at 10:13
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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1Also 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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1@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
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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
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
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.
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