This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
How To: Adding New Voices For Text To Speech In Mac OS X Lion
As many of you would know Apple has presented text to speech in the Mac OS for many years even pre-dating Mac OS X. Well, with the release of Mac OS X Lion they have expanded on the available voices. Many of the voices are by default not included in the installation and need to be downloaded on request.
The good thing about these additional voices is Apple has not only included a few more novelty voices but they have also included other languages besides English and even other accents within the English Language.
In order to access and download these additional voices simply proceed to the System Preferences and then to the Speech area as highlighted below:
Then, make sure you are in the Text To Speech tab and then click on the system voice to bring down the following drop down menu:
Select ‘Customise’ and the following window will be displayed:
This window displays the voices which are not currently on your system but are available for download.
To play a sample simply highlight one and select play. When you have found a voice you wish to add simply place a tick in the box next to the name as shown in the image above and then press okay and the voice in question will be downloaded through Software Update.
You will be presented with the following message upon request to download:
As you can see you are told the size of the file that will be downloaded. For a voice you may be wondering why is the file size so large.
These new voices are incredibly high quality. You will honestly believe a real person is sitting right next to you when you play them back.
If you still want to install the voice simply press the install button, agree to the license agreement and the download and installation will take place. The new voice will be automatically added and you can select it, once downloaded and installed, without restarting your system.
