Did you know that your Mac is capable of reading highlighted text out loud? This is a feature that could come in handy for many reasons, whether you prefer to have some particular text read, for accessibility reasons, if you’re focusing on something else, for dramatic effect, or myriad other purposes.
Did you know that your Mac is capable of reading alerts for you, in addition to displaying them on the screen? This is a handy Accessibility feature that’s a bit buried in system settings.
Did you know that your iPhone and iPad can read Safari content displayed on the screen out loud? This is a feature that could prove to be quite useful if you’re busy focusing on something else, you want an article or webpage read to you, or for accessibility purposes.
Did you know that your iPhone and iPad can read highlighted texts out loud? This is a feature that could come in handy for any number of reasons, but it may be particularly useful if you’re busy focusing on something else, want to know how to say or pronounce something, want something read to you, … Read More
The iPhone and iPad have a little known text-to-speech functionality that will verbally spell out a selected word or string for you. This great feature is useful for many obvious reasons, whether for educational purposes, or perhaps you can’t quite make out if what you’re reading on the iPad or iPhone screen is supposed to … Read More
Did you know the iPhone or iPad can read aloud anything that is on screen? The Speak Screen feature of iOS is helpful for many reasons, but in order to use it you must first enable the ability within the device settings, and then learn how to use the speak function.
Siri has the ability to read anything on the screen of an iPhone or iPad to you. And yes, that means Siri will quite literally read aloud whatever is open and on the display of an iOS device, whether it’s a web page, an article, an email, a text message, anything on the screen will … Read More
Talking calculators are very useful, whether for accessibility reasons or just for entering a lot of numbers that you want to be sure are correct by hearing the auditory response. Thanks to the Mac’s excellent text-to-speech abilities and a simple settings adjustment, you can transform the bundled Calculator app in Mac OS X into a … Read More
The default voice for speaking text in iOS is the same voice as Siri, but if you want to switch it up and hear something different you can change the text-to-speech voice quite easily. Switching voices is a bit more fun than you’d expect though, at least with English, because you end up with different … Read More
Want to initiate Text to Speech with a keyboard shortcut on the Mac? The excellent Mac OS text to speech function can be activated with a simple keystroke, but first you have to enable the feature. This is a great trick because it allows you to quickly speak what is in on the Mac screen … Read More
Want to have your emails read to you? How about talking to write out a reply rather than poking around on the touch screen? You can easily do both in iOS, so the next time you need to read and write emails while you’re on the go or driving, consider using the awesome text-to-speech and … Read More
If you bought a new Mac with OS X Lion (or later) pre-installed you probably already have the voice of Siri enabled by default. Siri is actually called “Samantha”, but if you upgraded to OS X Lion manually from Snow Leopard you may have missed the addition of Siri’s voice completely, so here’s how to … Read More
The newer versions of iOS include a fantastic text to speech engine that lets you select any text and have it spoken to you. This basically means you can have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch read you the content of any web page, notes, text files, or even eBooks and iBooks. Before you can … Read More
Along the lines of vocally announcing task completion within the command line, you can also have Mac OS X speak the output of any executed command.
By appending the say command to the end of another command, Mac OS X will vocally announce when the initial task has finished running successfully. For example, to have OS X announce that a particular script has finished running the command could be: python backup.py && say “jobs done” The important part is the “&& … Read More
One of OS X’s many great new features are all the new high quality multi-lingual voices (here is how to add them yourself). If you went on a voice adding spree like I did, you may quickly realize that all these new voices take up a fair amount of disk space, each weighing in around … Read More
Mac OS X includes many high quality voices for it’s text-to-speech abilities, they’re in a wide variety of languages and accents and are probably some of the best computer rendered voices out there. But guess what? Many of these incredible voices are not installed by default on a Mac! Thankfully that’s easy to change, and … Read More
If you have a lengthy amount of text to read or review that you don’t have time to actually read, another alternative is to convert that text into an audio track. This is kind of like making an audiobook out of any text block, and it can be as long or as short as you … Read More
