Save space on your hard drive: Delete unwanted speech voices from your Mac [OS X Tips]

Hard drive space is at a premium these days, with files getting larger and solid state drives (SSD) becoming more affordable and ubiquitous. I’m typing on a MacBook Air right now, and making sure I don’t clutter up the drive with unnecessary files is important to me.

One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you’re not using those text-to-speech voices, you might as well clear them off your drive and save some space. Here’s how.

If you want to get rid of the whole kit and caboodle at once, launch Terminal from the Applications folder, the dock, or with an app launching system, like Alfred. Type or paste the following command:

cd /System/Library/Speech/

This will change the directory (cd) you’re focusing on to the one in which the speech files are contained. To delete them all, simply type or paste the following:

sudo rm -rf Voices/*

This will dump every single text-to-speech voice on your system, so don’t do it if you want to keep one or more voices. In that case, navigate to the /System/Library/Speech/Voices/ folder on your hard drive and delete the voices you aren’t going to use, like Cello, or Bahh. Because, really, how often do you have your Mac read to you in the sound of string instruments or sheep?

Via: OS X Daily