Having an entity read the article to me is invaluable.

Simply reading to catch typos and punctuation errors is one thing. Additionally, the higher quality voice is quite valuable to Mac users who might be learning english pronunciation and sentence formation.Īs for me, aside from the fact that text-to-speech is a huge help when my aging eyes are tired after a long day at the keyboard, I have found this capability to be incredibly useful as a proofreading tool for the very same articles you read in my How-To column here at TMO. The technology in Alex presents a huge advantage to those who, due to visual impairment, regularly require screen-reading capabilities. I began using Alex to read articles and other text to me while I was engaged doing something else, and I found that I no longer needed to listen closely, straining to understand what was being said. As a result of this vast improvement, I immediately found the use of synthetic speech to finally provide value for me. This mellifluous male voice included breath and pause control to augment comprehension of the spoken words and phrases. When OS X 10.5 Leopard was uncaged back in 2007, Apple included some new high-fidelity text-to-speech capabilities in the form of a single new voice called Alex. In a bit,I'll show you how to try these out for yourself. Vestiges of early artificial-sounding voices are still present today as novelties for some light-hearted, geeky entertainment – or for the nostalgic. This was something from the future! The synthesized Mac voices were used to entertain many a Mac aficionado at user group meetings across the world. Nevertheless, back then, it was downright awe-inspiring. The Talking Moose provided many Mac old-timers with hours of silly fun.Įarly voices were highly robotic and astonishingly crude by today's standards. It sure is great to get out of that bag.' Heck, we even used to have a talking moose! And, who can forget young Steve Jobs introducing the new Macintosh on-stage in 1984? Using software called MacinTalk, it announced itself to the world by saying, 'Hello. This takes me back to the Mac's very early days in the mid-eighties when, even then, its operating system was outfitted with synthetic speech capabilities. As I write this, it's the Macintosh's 29th birthday.

Text to speech for macbook