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Did y'all know macOS has a built-in text-to-speech system that is pretty decent? Go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Speech and set a keyboard shortcut,

Did y'all know macOS has a built-in text-to-speech system that is pretty decent? Go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Speech and set a keyboard shortcut, then you can turn any piece of text into an audio book by simply selecting it and pressing the text-to-speech keyboard shortcut. You'll need to set the Speaking Rate pretty high for this to be useful. It works great for news, blog posts, HN discussions, and amazingly powerful proofreading tool for writers. More info with screenshots here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem8qpMmnaBFYOgV32gdMc/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...

vel0city 7y ago
The Mac line has had text to speech functionality since the very beginning, even being somewhat showcased at the first reveal of the Macintosh by Steve Jobs. https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY?t=208 https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY?t=208 Although, I imagine the quality of the reader has greatly improved since 1984.
- ivan_ah 7y ago
  > Although, I imagine the quality of the reader has greatly improved since 1984. Exactly. I've tries a number of text-to-speech options before and found the voicing to be almost unusable, but the Alex voice in macOS (at least since 10.5) is pretty good. It even does the right context-dependent thing for polysemy cases, e.g. "I live in the mountains" vs. "I went to a live concert".
catacombs 7y ago
While this seems like a good idea, you lose the varying character voices some narrators put into their readings, which helps with immersion.
dingus 7y ago
There's also a terminal incantation to input a text file and output a multi-hour long sound file of the entire document processed with text-to-speech. It's about what you'd expect it to sound like... almost unbearable. But maybe the updated Siri voices are better, I haven't tried it for a few years.
- ivan_ah 7y ago
  I believe the Alex voice is not synth, but actual phoneme voice files of a real human. When I look in `/System/Library/Speech/Voices` and run `du -sh *` I see Alex.SpeechVoice is 877MB so godda be something wav-like in there.

vel0city 7y ago

The Mac line has had text to speech functionality since the very beginning, even being somewhat showcased at the first reveal of the Macintosh by Steve Jobs. https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY?t=208 https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY?t=208 Although, I imagine the quality of the reader has greatly improved since 1984.

ivan_ah 7y ago
> Although, I imagine the quality of the reader has greatly improved since 1984. Exactly. I've tries a number of text-to-speech options before and found the voicing to be almost unusable, but the Alex voice in macOS (at least since 10.5) is pretty good. It even does the right context-dependent thing for polysemy cases, e.g. "I live in the mountains" vs. "I went to a live concert".

catacombs 7y ago

While this seems like a good idea, you lose the varying character voices some narrators put into their readings, which helps with immersion.

dingus 7y ago

There's also a terminal incantation to input a text file and output a multi-hour long sound file of the entire document processed with text-to-speech. It's about what you'd expect it to sound like... almost unbearable. But maybe the updated Siri voices are better, I haven't tried it for a few years.

ivan_ah 7y ago
I believe the Alex voice is not synth, but actual phoneme voice files of a real human. When I look in `/System/Library/Speech/Voices` and run `du -sh *` I see Alex.SpeechVoice is 877MB so godda be something wav-like in there.