Voice-to-text speech technology quality has improved over the years and Apple is keeping up with the technology by introducing advancements in Mac OS X to support this technology. Mac OS X Lion doesn’t offer a lot of default voice choices, but armed with this tip you’ll find out that there is lot more for your ear to hear than what your eyes can see.
By default Mac OS X Lion only offers three female and three male voices that are active and available for you to choose from. There are actually four extra female voices, three other male voices, 14 novelty voices, and a plethora of foreign ones. If you want to check them out and turn one or more of them on or off just launch System Preferences, access the Speech control panel and then the Text to Speech tab. Now click on the System Voice drop down and you’ll see the following:
Click on Customize… and you’ll get a list of all the available default voices and others that you can activate. In the U.S. I was able to select from other English male and female voices, novelty voices, and a plethora of foreign voices. If a voice doesn’t exist on your Mac then you’ll be prompted to download it from the internet. If that happens you may see this prompt:
David W. Martin has more than 20 years of experience in the industry as a programmer, systems and business analyst, author, and consultant. David has written for CNET’s iPhoneatlas.com, MacLife.com, CultofMac.com, BYTE.com and recently for aNewDoman.net. He comes to Cult of Mac’s website with deep knowledge and passion for the all things Apple. Follow David on Twitter @david_w_martin or see what he’s up to now at davidwmartin.com.
9 responses to “Discover New English, Foreign And Novelty Text-To-Speech Voices in Lion [OS X Tips]”
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The Ozzy one sounds the most realistic IMHO. The UK English male is awful!
The voices are excellent and were one of the main reasons why I wanted Lion (I develop language training software). They are probably licensed from Nuance, but unfortunately the Lion EULA explicitly mentions that the voices may only be used for personal projects. So you can neither integrate even a sample generated with the Lion TTS voices on a website or inside e.g. a game. If you want to use them beyond having text read for yourself, you still have to pay a LOT for the regular licenses, which are usually “pay-per-use”, i.e. you pay for each time someone listens to it.
Besides this having a large number of voices available is great for experimentation. There is a also a very useful command called “say” for use in terminal, that accepts a number of parameters (type ‘man say’) and can also write the sample to a file instead of just playing it. It has been available at least since 10.4, but so far the voices delivered with OSX were pretty crappy, especially non English voices.
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