I use Mac's Text to Speech function a lot. Under Settings > Speech > Text to Speech I also have set a "Key" for quick access.
Since I also want Text to Speech to read German and OS Lion offers Voices for other languages, I would like to have a second shortcut for German.
Does anyone know where I can set this? Or is the only way to constantly change the System Voice before I want a German text to be read? (And then reset the voice to Alex for English texts)? And what about French text?
What options exist for this general problem?
Best Answer
Say as …
You can use the
say
command with OS X's other voices to get different languages. Use theThomas
voice to get French pronunciation orYannick
for German.In this example, I will use Thomas and French as this is what I know but
Yannick
should work as well for German text.Try the following command in Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app:
If this is acceptable, you can wrap the
say
command up in an Automator service; which we will do next.Automator Service
To create the Automator Service:
Copy and paste in the AppleScript below:
To use the service:
Et voilà ! Other languages and voices are available.
This Automator approach allows you to keep your computer default voice set to your preferred language. While allowing selected text to be read in the alternative voice.
Available Voices and Languages
You can list the available voices and their associated languages with the command:
The available voices can change between versions of macOS. On macOS 10.13, the command returns: