Play the Droid Sound Effect from Mac OS X

You know those Motorola Droid commercials where a robotic voice says “Droid”, or more accurately Drooooid? Oddly enough, your Mac may have been the originator of this sound, and without any additional software you have the ability to play and save the sound yourself right in OS X.

How to Play the Droid Sound Effect

You can make the sound effect on Mac OS X by typing the following in the command line:

say -v Cellos "droid"

I don’t know for sure if this means the Droid sound effect was created on a Mac or if it’s just a very similar sounding coincidence, but there is certainly some irony here if an iPhone competitors sound effect was made using a built-in Mac text-to-speech voice.

Save the Droid Sound Effect as an Audio File

If you want to use this Droid sound effect later, say for a ringtone or alert message, you can export the audio using the say command as well, here’s how:

say -v Cellos -o "droid.m4a" "droid"

This will export a file named ‘droid.m4a’ to your current working directory (most likely your home) that is only the Droid sound effect.

You can export the droid sound effect as other audio formats too, AIFF is the default if you don’t specify another choice. I chose m4a because it’s easily readable by iTunes which can then be converted to MP3, AAC, M4R (ringtone), WAV, or whatever other audio type.

Then using the Mac command line mp3 player afplay, we can verify that the audio export worked by playing the sound:

afplay droid.m4a
afplay comes installed in Mac OS X and does not require any additional downloads. You can also just double-click on the file in the Finder and it will open in iTunes, or you can launch it in whatever your favorite audio player is.

I had this Droid sound set as my iPhone ringtone for a while and it always turned some heads. Of course, you could always take it a step further and just install Android on your iPhone but I would not recommend it.