Making The Mac Talk Via Terminal

Hi everyone, is there a way to make the Mac talk via the terminal window? (command prompt).

I know how to make it talk from the System Preference but can I do it via the prompt? :headphone

G'day arai speed,

I'm interested to know what this would be useful for?

$ say what you want it to say

It'll do it in whatever voice is selected.

Pulse-8 said:

G'day arai speed,

I'm interested to know what this would be useful for?

Click to expand...

Well, I use a lot of command line utilties, some of which take awhile to complete. Okay, maybe not so much now with faster macs, but I could write a script that encodes a bunch of .aiff files to .mp3. At the end of the script I could put in

/usr/bin/say your files have been encoded, by your command

Then I would know it was done, and it would be like a cylon told me!

Way over my expertise/comfort zone, but certainly kewl:bushman:

That is too cool! I come from a Linux background and I thought I knew my way around the command line but this is a great new command I had no idea even existed! Too cool. Thanks!

walkerj said:

$ say what you want it to say

It'll do it in whatever voice is selected.

Click to expand...

U da man! Thanks.

Pulse-8 said:

G'day arai speed,

I'm interested to know what this would be useful for?

Click to expand...

I want to use it to play a prank on a co-worker

I have the following line in my crontab to remind me it is getting late on a work nite. It sets the volume so it isn't too loud and selects a prefered voice.


To select the voice on the command line do this;


The voices in Leopard are suppose to be way better than 10.4.

Hey I just did that xstep ... I'll probably forget it next time I try to impress someone with a terminal trick ....

I just tried this and it turns out that the quotes aren't needed. For example, I can just type:

say -v Agnes Hi There Sailor

and it works.

Is there some place to get a listing of the available voices? From the above we see Agnes and Victoria - how many more are available?

mac57 said:

Is there some place to get a listing of the available voices? From the above we see Agnes and Victoria - how many more are available?

Click to expand...

System Preferences->Speech->Text to Speech and the list is in a drop down menu.

Amen-Moses

Thanks Amen-Moses. Much appreciated!

That's cool.

I noticed when you don't use the quotes that it says the statement then repeat the entire thing with "say -v Agnes Its 11pm"