Text to Speech with OSX Leopard

Holy shit: This album is amazing. A must listen.

There’s a new text-to-speech voice with Leopard that is really good:

open the control panel
open “speech”
select “alex” as the voice

Now, this doesn’t work with Firefox, but it does with Safari. to use it:

go to a webpage you want spoken (news pages work well).
select the text you want read.
go to the “safari” menu
go to menu item “services”
go near the bottom for sub menu item “speech”
select “start speaking text”

It’s not perfect, but if you need to do something else and still catch up on blogs, news, whatever, it’s good enough that the point will get conveyed.

(Listen to this post through the voice)

This was written by Brian Risk. Posted on Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 2:59 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

6 Comments

Robert Risk wrote:

Hey I just tested the text to speech bundled in with microsoft. Is this inferior to those referenced in your post?

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 11:22 am | Permalink
Brian Risk wrote:

Well, Robert Risk, you could listen to the sample in the link I provided and see (I mean “hear”) for yourself. (I really don’t know what Microsoft’s text-to-speech sounds like)

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 12:19 pm | Permalink
rich from at&t text to speech labs wrote:

http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/richattresponse.MP3

Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 1:55 pm | Permalink
microsoft sam wrote:

http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/sam2.MP3

Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2:06 pm | Permalink
tts hillary wrote:

this is a pretty sophisticated tts engine

http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/hil.MP3

Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2:22 pm | Permalink
tts hillary wrote:

http://www.radioentropy.com/attach/hillaryunplugged.MP3

Friday, May 16, 2008 at 4:21 pm | Permalink

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