How to Try out speech synthesis

1 Turn on keyboard control

Go to > System Preferences (or open it using Spotlight or the Dock). Click on the Accessibility pane and then the Speech tab. Check the box labelled ‘Speak selected text when key is pressed’.

2 Choose a shortcut

The default keyboard shortcut is å+oe. To change it to something different, click Change Key and then press a new key combo you prefer – one that’s not used for anything else. When finished, click OK.

3 Try out voices

To change the default voice, click the popup menu labelled System Voice and choose a preinstalled option. To download more voices, pick Customise. Click one’s row and then Play to hear it. Tick one and click OK to download.

4 Select text to read

Now, in a text document (or web page), select the passage of text you want your Mac to read to you and press Speech’s key combo. It’s worth experimenting with different voices to find out which one you like best.

5 Read alert text

To have your Mac speak alerts in dialog boxes, check the ‘Enable announcements’ box in Speech’s preferences. This will play an audio alert when a dialog box appears, after which your Mac will read the contents of the box.

6 Make alerts distinctive

To customise the way alerts are read out, click Options. Choose the voice that will read them out, and the phrase that’s used to get your attention. You can also set the time delay between that phrase and the dialog’s content.

7 Terminal gets talky

If you prefer, you can also invoke text to speech directly from Terminal, without having to switch it on in System Preferences. In Finder, go to /Applications/Utilities or choose Go > Utilities. Open Terminal from this folder.

8 Hello, Mac

In Terminal, type: say "Hello” to make your Mac say the word in quotation marks. To specify a voice, use the form say -v <voice>, followed by the phrase to speak, where <voice> is the name of a voice installed on your Mac.