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"
...
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 -> ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
...
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 ...
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 ...
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” (...
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 -> ...
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, ...
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.
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
...
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
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 ...
3
votes
why iphone "text to speech" english is much clearer than french?
Have you tried other french boices?
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 ...
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
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 :
...
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
...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 "...
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....
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 ...
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 ...
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♦
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