You can even choose your voice and have much more fun with the command : say -v “voiceName” “text to say”įor instance, with Daniel’s voice: say -v Daniel “i am a lady” You can change the speed/speech rate with option -r Nor the embedded speech command ], where N is the nimber of words per minutes: say -r 400 'Just what do you think you're doing Dave?' say '] Just what do you think you're doing Dave?' Still, you can simply convert the output file into a mp3 with the lame command say “text to read out loud” -o filename.extension : for instance : say “hello world” -o hello.aiff lame -m m hello.aiff hello.mp3

Unfortunately, outputting a mp3 file is not yet possible directly. Available output formats are AIFF, caff, m4af, WAVE. Since macos x 10.6, you can also change the file format: say “hello world” -o hello - file-format m4af say “hello world” -o hello.m4aīoth the above commands output the file hello.m4a. But you can even save the output as a aiff file: say “hello world” -o hello.aiff The only restriction with this is that the text-to-voice interpreter is only in English. Will output a voice that has been set by default in your system preferences. This is the simple example of the say command: say “hello” The magical “say” command in your macos terminal is really unique. Now, you can also have more fun with the terminal commands. As a pre-installed text-to-speech system, you can use this functionality to provide feedback to users during script execution instead of reading a message visually, the user can listen to it audibly.Ĭontrol ofthe Speak selection Your Mac can Say Hello to You : Basics You can tell your mac to convert any text to speech.

Make your mac read any text : Spoken Content NB : These have been tested on my macOS Big Sur 11.3.1 with the Apple M1 chip. With all these different options, you can really have fun and generate audio files for professional purpose or for pranks :) This is a quick tutorial how to use the text-to-speech in macOS : to read any text in any program, to use the terminal with the say command to speak to you, and the different parameters to change the voices, languages and parameters (pitch, speed …). It also has a text-to-speech functionality : you highlight any text and it reads to you. MacOS have a fun command-line program called “say”: you type “ say” and enter some text and it reads to you. Text-to-speech in macOS : having fun with say command to make your macOS talk to you

Talk to type macbook