Save Text As Audio

You can have your Mac speak text to you and also have it save that audio as a file that you can listen to later or even on your iPhone after syncing the file via iTunes. Learn how to take a text file and convert it to a spoken word audio file using the Terminal.

Comments: 12 Responses to “Save Text As Audio”

    Jeff
    7 years ago

    I don't know how you find all this stuff out but that is awesome! please keep up the 'terminal' videos. I love it!

    Robert
    7 years ago

    Hi Gary, great video. In saving to iPhone, would you then be able to add to voice memos?

    7 years ago

    Robert: No. Voice memos is all about recording your voice. You can put these audio files on your iPhone a number of other ways: iTunes sync, iCloud Music Library, iCloud Drive, lots of third-party apps, etc.

    Troy
    7 years ago

    This is great. Can you go the "other way"? That is, take an audio file and have terminal create a text file?

    7 years ago

    Troy: Not really. The best way is to actually hire someone to transcribe the audio. That's what people like me do (to create the transcripts for the videos here). There are apps that you can buy that try to do it via the computer, but they only work in ideal situations and even then need a human to review them and make corrections.

    Vaman Kale
    7 years ago

    That was fantastic!! Many thanks. That's why I always eagerly open your mail when it comes.

    Pat
    7 years ago

    Gary, that was really neat about creating audio files. Now since I "think" the Mac can be language specific; is it possible to scan in, text in another language, say Spanish, and have the audio file read it back correctly? Thank you, and I really enjoy your weekly posts. pat

    7 years ago

    Pat: If you go into System Preferences, Accessibility, Speech you can choose "Customize" under the voice selection and pick voices in a large variety of languages, including Spanish. So I would start my switching to a Spanish voice first, then I would think it would read Spanish text very well.

    Mr. Luigi
    7 years ago

    Hi Gary, This was really awesome. Students with learning differences such that they need audio versions of written material could find this very helpful. Not all written learning resources come in audio versions and this gives students and their teachers an option to create them. Bravo to you!

    Eric Therrien
    7 years ago

    Gary good day,
    I did try to change a text to .aiff file but Terminal return an error.
    iMac-de-Famille:~ familletherrien$ say -v Chantal -f /Users/familletherrien/Desktop/LeTueuraGages.txt -o /Users/familletherrien/Desktop/LeTueuraGages
    Input text is not UTF-8 encoded
    That voice is in french!

    7 years ago

    Eric: Sounds like that text file may have the wrong encoding to work with the "say" command.

    Lucian Gomes
    7 years ago

    I love this

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