Guide: How to Make Your Mac Speak Using a Terminal Command
Since the introduction of the first Macintosh computer in 1984, text-to-speech has been an important factor feature of the platform. While the Mac’s voice quality and capabilities have skyrocketed since then, there is still an old-fashioned way to make your Mac speak: through the Terminal. To use speech in Terminal, open a new Terminal window and type say followed by a space and your desired word or phrase, then press the Return key. In our example, let’s say to Terminal “Hi Jim:” ..
(Karen) say (v) (text)
Hi Jim, how are you?
say -f text.txt Karen
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.
To create an audio file of your Mac’s spoken words, use the -O option. This will create an AIFF file in the user’s music folder. To have Karen read that text file at 250 words per minute and output the speech to an AIFF file, use the following command: -O “user’s music folder” Karen reads text at 250 words per minute ..
Karen, please input 250 into the text field and press the “save” button.
say -n “Hello, world!” This will print “Hello, world!” in the Terminal window.
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
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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.
If you have any queries about the How to Make Your Mac Speak Using a Terminal Command guide, then please ask us through the comment section below or directly contact us. Our team is always happy to help you.
