I just made the update to Mac OS X Lion. It’s insane how much easier it is to update your operating system on an Apple than a PC. It was only $29.99 and I installed it right from the App Store on my computer. There are tons of cool new features. Especially one in particular I just stumbled upon tonight, “Text to Speech”. I’m pretty sure Macs have had this feature for a long time, I just never noticed it until now.
I was just perusing the plethora of options within the Text to Speech feature on my Mac and came across an option that allows you to have your computer “speak” whatever text you have selected, simply by pressing a simple key-combination.
Here’s How!
- Go to System Preferences (You can get there by clicking the little black apple at the top-left of the screen)
- Click on Speech (It’s the little microphone on the bottom row)
- Inside of the “Speech” feature there are 2 tabs at the top of the box, go into the Text to Speech tab by clicking on it.
- Select the checkbox that says, “Speak selected text when the key is pressed“
- Close out of System Preferences cause you’re all set!
Quick Tip: To close out of any currently open program, press and hold “command”, and while holding, click the “Q” key (command+Q)
Now you can highlight any bit of text, press [option+esc], and the computer will read back to you whatever you have selected.
Practical Uses:
- Highlight an entire article on the web and let the computer read it for you. — Hey, why don’t you test it out on this page ;)
- Highlight your friend’s Status Updates on Facebook and let the computer read them back. You could even go back into the System Preferences and change the computer voice to female and match your friend’s gender… lol
- Open up a “Text Edit” document, write a bunch of funny stuff and make your computer read it back. For some reason this is so freaking entertaining! I have spent a good few hours writing profanities and funny sentences and making Alex (my computer voice) read them back to me.
I work in an office where everyone sits on their computers for hours at a time. I can’t wait to hook my computer up to the Bose wireless speakers and type something hilarious. Maybe something like, “My name is Murphy, I am your Bose speaker system. Karson, you are looking pretty fat today…” I think it would get some good laughs.
I’m excited to hear what cool stuff you’re able to come up with using the Text to Speech feature on the Mac. Be sure to post any conversation down below as a comment.
I’ve got an idea… How about in the comments, you guys write little chunks of funny text that we can all highlight and make the computer read back? That could be pretty cool.
Catch you later!
Done that. But it still doesn’t read my pdf file like it used to in Snow Leopard. Can you help me?
In case anyone on this thread is interested, there seems to be an issue with this feature in Lion when compared to earlier versions of OS X. It turns out it won’t work on every app as well as it used to.
I blogged about a solution/workaround here: http://nickbona.com/blog/2011/12/12/speak-selected-text-in-os-x-lion.html
very cool, a little dangerous in that I now know another way to multitask! :)
Heck ya!
I haven’t upgraded to Lion, but I have used text-to-speech! :) It is one of Mac’s many awesome little features! There are so many of them, most people (me included) don’t even know everything their computer can do! I am just now learning all of the functions of my video camera, and I’ve had my Mac for almost 4 years! I used to play with text-to-speech a lot. You can also have Alex announce the time automatically (which can be kind of creepy when you forget to turn it off at night…)
Haha that is creepy indeed.
Awww! That would be way creepy. I personally don’t like to have Alex update me on the time. Get’s so annoying after the one-hundredth time ;)
Great info for mac-loving nerds. Hahah.
What are you implying? ;)
Awesome post, and super useful tip! I’ve got it all setup and I tested it on this page.
Here’s a little something for you to rally:
“Herm-ahknee, hermyown, hermy-ah-knee… Hagrid?”
YES!
HAHA! I’m glad you set it up and played around with it. Fun right?
PS. – Your little snippit is hilarious to play back!
Love this post… I need to upgrade to Lion! I’ve used my little speech thing in Terminal, but never to this degree. Very informal… and the writing is hilarious. You definitely need to hook that up to the wireless speakers! haha
Ya, I love how simple it is to just select any chunk of text and hit a hotkey. Totally rad and fun!