Installing additional Text to Speech voices on your Mac

Say hello to Anna and Serena 

I admit it: I am a bad reader. I don’t enjoy much sitting down and reading a long text. Worst are my skills, reading on a screen.

Sure, great typography like on this page can greatly improve the reading experience. But I consider myself to be on the auditory learners side. I can listen for hours to podcasts. Other people’s shelves are bursting with books. My bookshelf is my extensive audible library.

For this reason I love the built in Text to speech feature in Mac OS X. With the Update on Leopard “Alex” showed on my drive. A great natural sounding male voice. And with Lion a whole family of great voices in many international languages became available to Mac users for free.

Installing new voices and different languages

Since I am a native German speaker I have to read many texts in German. Anna, a german Voice helps me a lot.

International Voices are not available from the start. You have to install them first. This option is actually quite hidden.

Open the System Preferences and go to “Dictation and Speech > Text to Speech”.

System Preferences Dictation & Speech with open Text to Speech tab

Click on the drop-down menu “System Voice”. There you have a choice of preinstalled voices. Here you can switch to your preferred speaker.

Voice selection dropdown

If there isn’t a voice available for your language select “Customize…”

Now you have the whole collection of apples quality voices available to choose from. You can get an audio preview of a voice by selecting it and press the “play” button on the bottom left side of the panel. Mark the check boxes of all voices you want to use. If a vice is not installed you’ll get a warning, that these voices will be downloaded automatically.

Select voice dialog with new voices selected

After finishing this dialog with “OK” you will be asked to confirm the installing of the new voices. Follow the instructions and finish the voices installation. This Process can take a while and a new voice can take up a considerable amount of disk space.

From now on you can select nearly every text and select “speech>start speak” from the right click menu and listen to it.

But There are some drawbacks on Mac OS X:

1. The Text to Speech feature doesn’t recognize the language of selected text automatically. You have to select to the appropriate voice in the system preferences.
2. Not all Apps allow Speech output of Text. Especially proprietary ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle suppress accessing the text with the systems text to speech features.
3. While the current voices are already a great improvement, there is still a long way to go before they sound like living human beings.

But especially for auditory learners the effort is with it:

1. Listening to a text can improve reading comprehension
2. Letting the computer read your own texts aloud is a great way of proof reading. You instantly recognize errors, that you normally skip while reading.
3. Reading and listening to the text simultaneously is a good training tool to improve your reading skills
4. If you are learning a new language, you can improve your feel for the pronunciation by listening to the text spoken by your computer.

Now close your eyes and let Alex, Fiona or Serena read this text aloud for you!