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8 votes

MacOS highlight individual words as they are spoken, as iOS

VoiceOver on macOS can do this. Use VoiceOver Utility.app to activate move highlight cursor by word Activate VoiceOver with Cmd+F5 Click on the text you want to read Press Control+Alt+A to "read all" ...
Matt Sephton's user avatar
  • 5,160
7 votes

Getting the Mac to read PDF files aloud

Preview voice reading will happen after selecting the text you require to be read first / as mentioned above it needs to be selectable and recognisable text - then proceed with previous steps: Edit -> ...
Mark Wybrow's user avatar
7 votes

Speak screen saying "one dollar?"

I can't really get the code of the web page/app, but checking older/similar JavaScript/PHP code of uber.com it seems to be a hick-up of the Text-to-Speech framework which probably stumbles over a ...
klanomath's user avatar
  • 67k
6 votes
Accepted

How to change volume of "say" in AppleScript?

Since you are piping the output of the pbpaste command directly to say command, then e.g. [[volm 0.35]] would need to be a part of what's on the clipboard as e.g. [[volm 0.35]] must precede the ...
user3439894's user avatar
  • 59.8k
5 votes

How can I restart the text to speech feature?

have you tried entering these two commands in terminal? killall com.apple.speech.speechsynthesisd killall SpeechSynthesisServer You can do that in activity monitor, I just like terminal better. ...
Talos Potential's user avatar
5 votes

Make Speech in Safari read different languages

I would say this is a bug in macOS, so I've reported it. But there's a simple workaround: use Automator to create a simple Service to speak the selected text in a voice of your choice. You may also ...
Matt Sephton's user avatar
  • 5,160
5 votes
Accepted

How do I access MacOS Sonoma Personal Voice from command line?

The "say" command works fine with personal voice, but it doesn't do the necessary tasks to request permissions to be granted to the Terminal app. The problem is that Mac OS Sonoma does not ...
Elias Limneos's user avatar
4 votes

How can I delete some of the built–in text–to–speech voices?

To delete some or all of the voices: Launch the “VoiceOver Utility” (it is in /Applications/Utilities/). In the left pane select “Speech”. In the table with languages and voices, next to “English” (...
kirelagin's user avatar
  • 1,009
4 votes

Why is the text-to-speech hotkey not working?

I have found a solution that worked for me without restarting (although restarting worked before when this happened) My problem was that both the Hot Key or the contextual menu Right-Click -> ...
KrzysztofPrugar's user avatar
4 votes

lives vs lives: how can I correct the pronunciation of the 'say' command?

This may not be the elegant solution that you are wanting, but the macOS Speech Manager has speech tuning capabilities built in. You can use them by adding inline modifiers to your text. For example, ...
pion's user avatar
  • 4,964
3 votes

How to change volume of "say" in AppleScript?

simple answer: say "[[volm 0.04]] This is a sentence" Seems to me that from 0.01 to 0.04 is the smaller volume output. When I tried 0.25 or 0.35 the volume did not change.
S.Doe_Dude's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

AppleScript: Is it possible to check if Speech is currently running?

It's possible with the say command in a shell, not with the AppleScript say command. Info for the AppleScript say command: you can stop the speech of say command from the same script until the ...
jackjr300's user avatar
  • 2,602
3 votes

Getting the Mac to read PDF files aloud

A command line solution: Install homebrew. See https://docs.brew.sh/Installation for details. Launch Terminal and run: brew install xpdf pdftotext file.pdf - | iconv -t UTF-8//IGNORE | say
Adam Keck's user avatar
3 votes

How can you pause text to speech so that it restarts from where you left off?

You can download Dictater. It offers all the features that you needed from text to speech. Check out the list of features found on the site: Features Pause the audio Skip forward by sentences or ...
sayzlim's user avatar
  • 4,818
3 votes

why iphone "text to speech" english is much clearer than french?

Have you tried other french boices?
Tom Gewecke's user avatar
  • 21.4k
3 votes

MacOS highlight individual words as they are spoken, as iOS

You can try Dictator by Nosrac. It's available for free on GitHub. I'm not the developer or affiliated with the software. It has a feature called 'teleprompter mode' that highlights the words as ...
fsb's user avatar
  • 22.9k
3 votes
Accepted

How to save text to speech as a voice recording?

To save to a file use, the -o <file name> option. $ say “Hello World” -o helloworld.aiff
Allan's user avatar
  • 104k
3 votes
Accepted

How to make macOS Siri voice read current pasteboard (clipboard) buffer?

It doesn't appear that you can force it to use the Siri voice, but you can create a shortcut in the Shortcuts app that can speak text from the clipboard. The building blocks in the Shortcuts app are : ...
mcmar's user avatar
  • 496
2 votes

Text to Speech shortcuts with two languages

Launch Automator.app Create a new Service Add a Speak Text action Select Samantha Save the service as SpeakSamantha Setup a keyboard shortcut for the service Open System Preferences Select Keyboard ...
ffmaer's user avatar
  • 131
2 votes

How can you pause text to speech so that it restarts from where you left off?

What you want is Capti, Ghost reader, or Kurzweil. Capti is free, so it's probably the best (especially since it is pretty good quality). It highlights, pauses, etc. And you can export to your phone. ...
Talos Potential's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

How to get around “say” command bug when setting volume?

The best is to put '[[volm 0.35]] ' into the shell (not in the clipboard), like this: set this_say_Pid to do shell script "say '[[volm 0.35]]\\ '$(LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pbpaste -Prefer txt) > /dev/null ...
jackjr300's user avatar
  • 2,602
2 votes

Why can't my Mac say "defeat ISIS"?

Speech Synthesis in OS X As a user, you can affect macOS's text to speech pronunciation and approach. Everything you need to know is in Apple's Speech Synthesis in OS X. You can provide TUNE Format ...
Graham Miln's user avatar
  • 44.6k
2 votes
Accepted

Why does iOS Speak Selection read "2020" as "2020 inches" in English (UK)?

It's likely a bug, as I can't duplicate the behaviour in Notes on a Mac. However, the reason for the confusion may be that ' and '' symbols are used as a shorthand for feet and inches (also for ...
benwiggy's user avatar
  • 38k
2 votes
Accepted

lives vs lives: how can I correct the pronunciation of the 'say' command?

This is the closest I could get: Using lyyves with Kate (long I): WAV audio sample | mirror Using livvs with Kate (short I): WAV audio sample | mirror Confirmed working with voices Daniel, Fred, Alex, ...
leetbacoon's user avatar
2 votes

How to toggle Accessibility features with AppleScript in Ventura

The name of the "System Preferences" app has changed to "System Settings", and the app's UI has changed too. the "Speak items under the pointer" item is put in "...
zeewin's user avatar
  • 41
2 votes

How to toggle Accessibility features with AppleScript in Ventura

This following AppleScript code works for me on macOS Ventura do shell script "open -b com.apple.systempreferences " & ¬ "/System/Library/PreferencePanes/UniversalAccessPref....
wch1zpink's user avatar
  • 7,661
2 votes

How do I make the 'say -v PersonalVoice' command save output to a file?

It seems to be yet another Apple restriction rather than a bug. Although it notes in say's man page that not all voices are compatible with all audio configurations, I tried many of the system voices ...
Elias Limneos's user avatar
1 vote
Accepted

Speak screen saying "one dollar?"

Resolved This was a bug in iOS 11 beta 3 (and possibly 1 and 2). It was reported as happening in other apps on phones running the beta. This post reports it as a bug with AVSpeechSynthesisVoice. As ...
Shades's user avatar
  • 111
1 vote

Is there a way to start speaking a word using macOS text to speech by hovering over it and pressing a shortcut?

You can use the following Keyboard Maestro macro: Add a double click at current mouse location action. Add a press ⌥⎋ action. ⌥⎋ the default shortcut for ‘Speak selected text’, set in System ...
grg's user avatar
  • 206k

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