Guide: How to Make Your Mac Speak Using a Terminal Command
Hi Jim: Terminal “Hi Jim”
say -v Karen “I’m Karen” ..
Hi Jim, how are you?
say -f text.txt This will read all of the text from the text.txt file on your desktop and speak it to you. ..
Karen: Hey, what’s up?
By default, OS X will speak your text at normal speed. But you can use the -r option to make this faster or slower. Just add -r followed by a number indicating the desired reading speed words a minute. Although it varies by voice, 175 words per minute is approximately a “normal” speech rate. Increase that number to make your Mac speak faster, decrease it to sort things out. Building on our example from above, let’s Karen read that text document with a solid 250 words per minute:
Karen, using the command line, ran the test.txt file on the desktop.
If you make your Mac say something especially valuable, you can output the speech to an audio file for later playback or sharing. To do this, add the -O option to your command, followed by a path and file name. The default output format is AIFF. To wrap up our series of examples, let’s read Karen read that text file at 250 words per minute and output the speech to an AIFF file in our user’s music folder.
Karen, please input 250 into the text field and press the “save” button.
If you want to use the output option, your Mac will not speak the text live; it just synthesizes the audio and dumps it into your output audio file. This makes creating audio files from long documents much faster. These are the most common options for the say command in OS X. As with all Terminal commands, if you want to delve into some of the more esoteric stuff just use the Man command to pull up the manual for say: ..
OS X has a number of ways to use text-to-speech, but some people might prefer to use Terminal instead. The first reason is that it can be more fun to use Terminal commands, which often have more flexibility than the simpler GUI options. Say Via Terminal can be used to make jokes that will surprise your friends and family members. However, please be careful when using text-to-speech commands. There are a number of responsible ways to use it, and we’ll write a future tip about this topic. ..
How to Make Your Mac Speak Using a Terminal Command: benefits
Faq
Final note
This guide will show you how to make your Mac speak using a terminal command. This will allow you to communicate with your Mac in a more hands-on way, and also help you troubleshoot issues.
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