Getting Mac Text Messaging to Speech?

Question

The mac say command can specify the voice used with the -v flag.

 say -v Alex "compile completed, put your swords down." 

Available voices can be seen in the "System Preferences / Speech / Text for Speech" section. How can I get this list programmatically?

Answer 1

[NSSpeechSynthesizer availableVoices]

Answer 2

This is the list of available votes:

 say -v '?' 

Answer 3

 for voice in `say -v '?' | awk '{print $1}'`; do say -v "$voice" "Hello, my name is $voice."; done 

Answer 4

The shell version , without hacking is too cheap!

(Don't really use this, use the python version instead.)

 ls /System/Library/Speech/Voices | sed 's/.SpeechVoice$//' Agnes Albert Alex BadNews Bahh Bells Boing ... 

Answer 5

Python version , courtesy of Barry Wark :

 from AppKit import NSSpeechSynthesizer print NSSpeechSynthesizer.availableVoices() 

Answer 6

It takes a few votes to pass before making a decision. There is a huge change in quality.

For example, Tom sounds a little impatient, but more realistic than Alex. And some British voices are great.

Using say -v '?' gives you a list of established voices plus some sample sentences that give you an idea of ​​what to expect from a vote. You need to go through the settings in order to set most of the really good voices, but they come with a compact voice that lets you hear each voice sound before you download them.