You can see it created it almost instantly. So it's going to use Victoria's voice, it's going to take the input from this file and it's going to do output to this file here, got one too many f's. But now I'm going to backspace and change. I'm actually going to drag and drop again. I'm going to delete this file that I created here and I'm going to have it say, using Victoria's voice, reading the file I'm going to drag and drop here, outputting to the file. You can see it created this aiff file and now when I play it I should get the word hello spoken by Alex. So when I hit this it's going to do it but I need to give it some text. aiff because that is the file format that it's going to use. I'm going to copy the path and everything except extension and I can just leave it with no extension but I'm going to use. So let's create a file on the desktop here. So we're going to use dash O for output and give it a path to a file. Well, the way to do that is to use the O Command. Then I hit Return and it will read the text of that file.īut how do we get this to a file in AudioFile instead of listening to it right there on the spot.

If I have the prompt in terminal right there, I drag the file there, it will put the entire path there or at least the path that it needs. Or an easier way to do that is drag and drop. Now it's got to be the full path to the file so I could go and look at this file, do Command i and see that it's Macintosh HD users macmost desktop and then the name of the file. The way to do that, what you can do Say and I can do dash f and give it a file name. I want it to read from a file like say that file we were just looking at or it could be something much longer than that. Now I don't want to type out the entire bit of text that I want it to speak. And it's Victoria's voice instead of Alex's voice. So I could do Say and then dash V which means voice, Victoria, Hello. So, for instance, instead of Alex we could have used Victoria. Now you can customize the voice by going to System Preferences and then go to Accessibility, Speech, and here's the system voice and that's what voice it was using. So you would use say, Say Hello and you get the default voice saying whatever text it is you've typed after the word Say. All you need to do is use the Say command. Now it's very easy to get the Terminal to talk to you. It's going to bring up the Terminal window. So let's launch Terminal using Spotlight, Command Space Terminal and return. There's a way to do it through Automator but it's even easier to do it using the Terminal. But you can also save this speech as an audio file. It could be as simple as selecting text, Control clicking on it and going to Speech and start speaking. Video Transcript: So you probably already know you can have your Mac speak text you. Check out Save Text As Audio at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Speech to text for macbook