How To Have Your Mac Read Text To You

You can easily have your Mac read selected text out loud. You can select the voice and speed. With some more work you can add a keyboard shortcut or have it export the audio into a file to use later.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can get your Mac to read text to you. 
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So there a few built-in ways to have your Mac read text to you. They are pretty simple to use. For instance the first way is to use a menu item that's available no matter what your settings are. Here you can go to a webpage. You can go to something you're writing in Pages or an email that you received. All you need to do is select text, like you normally would to say copy it or change style or something like that. Once you have text selected you can go to Edit and then look for Speech. Then select Start Speaking. (Sample voice speaking). Now you've got some controls like which voice is going to be used. To get to those controls go to System Settings and from there go to Accessibility and then Spoken Content. Now here you've got your System Voice. You can change it to a variety of different voices. They are broken up by country and there are a whole bunch of different ones, especially for US English. If you look under Siri you'll get the Siri voices there. 
So let me select, say, voice 4 here. You can easily test these out by using the Play Sample button. (Hi, I'm Siri). Now you've got a speaking rate here so if it is speaking too slowly you can speed it up. You also have Volume which is relative to the system volume. So at the maximum amount it is going to use the regular system volume. But you can have it speak to you quieter. Like that. So once you've set that up you can see the changes right away. If you go to Edit, Speech, and Start Speaking. If while it is speaking you want it to stop you can go to Edit, Speech, and then Stop Speaking will be available while Speech is being used. 
Now you can also Control Click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad and then select from there Speech and then there is Start and Stop Speaking there as well. If you want you can set keyboard shortcuts for this. So go back into System Settings but this time go to Keyboard and then Keyboard Shortcuts and then go to App Shortcuts. Click the Plus button and then for all Applications use Start Speaking, spelled exactly as the menu item shows, and then assign something to it. Like I'm going to use Option Command and S and Done. Now I can use Option Command S to Start. You can see the keyboard shortcut appear here in the menu now. If you want you can also add another one for Stop Speaking. 
Now you may notice that if you don't select anything and then you go to Edit, Speech it is going to start speaking but it will speak everything it can find. So it is going to start speaking all the different menu items and navigation buttons and all of that. But you can click here on a webpage or use Shift Command R to go to Reader View. Reader View really boils the page down to just the text. So if you do a quick Shift Command R just to go into Reader View and then immediately use your Keyboard Shortcut or Edit, Speech, Start Speaking you can get an article read to you. It's also usually easier to select text here in Reader View than it is sometimes on a webpage. 
Now another way to have text spoken to you is to go into System Settings and let's go back to Accessibility and Spoken Content. There is an option there for Speak Selection. We're going to first go to the Details for this setting here and we can see there's a Keyboard Shortcut for this and we can set Highlight Content to either highlight either words or whole sentences as it is read to us. Change a color that's used. Change the sentence color. There's a lot that you can do here to customize exactly how this is going to look. Let's go and take a look at what happens when we use this.
So I'm going to turn it On and then I'm going to go back to this Safari page. What I'm going to do is select some text and then use Option Escape. So you can see how it is highlighting the words for us as it is going through the text. You've got this special set of controls here. You can increase the speed or decrease the speed right in here. You can stop and Play or jump ahead or go back while it is speaking to you. So this is kind of a more advanced interface. But it is going to use the same voice that we selected before. 
So there's another way to accomplish the same thing with a slightly different interface. It works the same way in Reader View here if I go to it and I haven't selected anything. I can do Option Escape and it will read everything. 
Now another way to do it is to use a Shortcut to do it. You can create your own shortcut in the Shortcuts App. I'll just create one here and I'll just have it speak, you can see Speak Text, and what text will I have it speak? Well, I'm going to Control Click here, insert variable and say I want Shortcut Input. So now I can set it to, instead of receiving images, or18 More, I can select All and then click again to deselect All and say just text. Where do I want it to come from? Well, if I go to Details here I can say Use as a Quick Action in the Services Menu. So now it will speak it. Under Show More I can actually set the voice here separate from the System Voice. So, for instance, I'll set it to Siri voice 1 in this case and I can change the pitch, which is interesting, and the rate as well. So now let's just name this something, like that. If I go back here into Safari and I select some text, Control Click on it and go to Services, I'll find Speak Selected Text right here and it will work.
So it really doesn't give you any additional functionality that you can't get the other ways and it is hard to have it stop. So it may not be the best thing to do but Shortcuts can do something a little different. Let's get rid of the Speak Action here. Instead look for Make Spoken Audio from Text. I'm going to bring that in. So it is going to take the shortcut input, Make Spoken Audio From Text, and then I can see here the same rate, pitch, and I can set the voice here as well. Now what it is going to do is make an audio file. If I want to I can just have it go to Quick Look and it will actually put that into a Quick Look window that I can then control. So now when I go to Services, Speak Selected Text, it will take a few seconds to generate this spoken text but the result is going to be a Quick Look window, like this. You can see it is 29 seconds and I've got Playback controls. I can jump around it in. I can even, instead of using Quick Look here I can have it Save a File and then I can save the spoken audio, ask where to save, and now when I use this I go into Services, Speak Selected Text, it will convert this to audio and now I'll Save it to the Desktop and you can see that now I have this audio file here and I can look at it in Quick Look or use it in a project if I want to. 
So Shortcuts has the ability to use the same text to speech that we were using in the earlier examples except now you can actually create an audio file and do various things with it. I hope you found this all useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Have Your Mac Read Text To You”

donald boyd

1 year ago

Do you know why the speech command does not work in Freeform for Mac?

Gary Rosenzweig

Donald: I guess it isn't supported in that app? You'd have to ask Apple "why."

Myron Gochnauer

"Start Speaking" seems to be a toggle. I can use the same shortcut to start and stop. The shortcut appears for "Start Speaking" only in the menu.
There seems to be no simple way to "Pause Speaking" since it does not appear as a menu item. It would be very useful, though, since I often pause to check something that was said, or to make a note of it.

Myron: Yes, so the other option would be better for you if you want to pause.

Comments Closed.

How To Have Your Mac Read Text To You

Comments: 4 Responses to “How To Have Your Mac Read Text To You”

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