For many of us, Mac OS X’s text-to-speech technology is a novelty: we use it every once in a while just to hear its mechanical voice read a line or two of text. The reality, though, is that many people depend on the technology to read pages of text or pronounce VoiceOver commands on a daily basis. With the addition of the “Alex” voice, Mac OS X Leopard provides much more realistic speech — that is, at least, so long as Alex knows how to pronounce what he reads!
Luckily, you can add your own word, acronym, or symbol pronunciations to the VoiceOver Utility so that Alex sounds more like your friend and less like your computer. Here’s how to add new pronunciations:
- Open VoiceOver Utility. You can find this application in your Utilities folder (which is inside your Applications folder).
- Click on the Speech tab. You’ll get a window that looks similar to this:
- As you can see, VoiceOver already has some customized pronunciations. If you click the Plus button at the bottom of the window, you can add your own pronunciations. Here’s the window that pops up:
- As you can see, there are several lines here. Just for purposes of demoing this window, I added the word “Yosemite.” On the pronunciation line, I added the “phonetic” spelling of the word, which is the spelling I need Alex to see in order to have the word sound the way I want it to. You can press Play to hear how the word will sound (as you may need to try a few spellings before it sounds proper to you).
- The last thing I did was simply create a new group called “My Pronunciations” so that I could separate the ones I was creating from the rest of the customized words.
- Unless you truly need to customize which applications use this pronunciation, I would allow All applications to use the pronunciation, and I would check the Ignore Case box so that both upper and lowercase versions of the word apply (though you may care about the case with proper names).
Hopefully this tip will improve your text-to-speech experience. Have you found other tricks for making Mac OS X’s synthesized speech sound better? Let others know in the comments.
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This does work to address Voice Over. However, by Apple’s own admission, Voice Over is different from Text To Speech which is the engine used when you highlight text in a webpage or document and select start speaking.
The thing is, whatever changes to pronunciation I make in Voice Over, they are not reflected in Text To Speech. In fact, none of the default pronunciation adjustments in Voice Over are reflected when writing some of these words in say TextEdit and selecting Start Speaking.
If you know how to fix this outside of installing a Cepstral voice (which you CAN change pronunciations on), please let me know.
I have to agree with CrasH’s comment the customization in VO is useless as it will not work with TTS. If you activate VO it will start announcing every single item such as Application, Menu names, window’s title text and so on since that’s what it was meant for, aka aid visually impaired users, unfortunately is a pain for all other users. Even with VO on TTS will not work any differently as it will not apply those pronunciation customization the user made in VO’s preference panel. Sounds to me you wrote this article without testing, but if I am wrong please include what you did to have it working on your mac and we will all be very grateful for the useful tip. Thanks for your interesting post!
well I would like to know if I am able to get voice for chat rooms
Yeah. I’m wondering why this article is still here. The poster obviously has not tested this in actual text-to-speech. It will work only in Voice-Over (if at all), not general text-to-speech, whatever the choices in the text field imply. This is another Apple botched ‘insanely great’ items that they create and forget.
I agree with freakqnc and danR. I don’t think the poster realized that these features do not work with TTS; only for VO. I’d like to be able to fix how poorly TTS pronounces some words. I am a writer and I use unique names for characters. The way TTS pronounces them is often painful and somewhat embarrassing. I know that the TTS system had a pronunciation option that actually worked in Tiger (10.4) but when I upgraded to Snow Leopard they broke it and now doesn’t even give me the option to fix the way it pronounces words.
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