Now we get to pick a voice and a location as to where the file shall be saved. Do let me know if there are.Īll we have to do is highlight some text, then right-click on it and select “add to iTunes as Spoken Track”.

I’m not sure if there are any length limitations to it. Whether it’s a website, a Word document or an email – if you can highlight a passage of text, macOS can turn it into audio. Let me show you how to do it in this article. It doesn’t open automatically and we won’t need it to transfer tracks to our iPhones either. Turns out, this text-to-audio option bypasses iTunes altogether. Perhaps I held off for so long because the option reads “add to iTunes as Spoken Track” – and I’m just not a big fan of iTunes. I’ve seen the option in the context menu many times, but I’ve never dared to use it until today.

This is a wonderful way to listen to written text while you’re on the go, or if you want to skim through text you or others have written while you’re occupied with another activity, such as walking or driving. I hope Apple will add a 'Corrections' feature to the Speech preference pane to allow people to enter corrections, new words, and exceptions.Ever since Lion, Mac OS X 10.7, there has been a great and very underrated feature built-in to every Mac: the ability to highlight some text and have macOS turn it into an audio file. It's not perfect: he makes more pronunciation mistakes than Cepstral David, but that's to be expected for v.1.0. My favorite part is that Alex actually breathes audibly just before starting a new sentence! I couldn't figure out why it sounded so natural, then a friend pointed out the quick inhalation just before he reads each new sentence. ( ) BTW, Cepstral's engine is fully compatible with Leopard too, in case you like their voices better - and they do have a much wider range than Apple does. It's leagues better than the Cepstral David voice I paid $30 for last year. Has anyone played around with the new (669MB!) Alex voice available in the text-to-speech section of the Speech preference pane? It's eerie how good it is: the first voice that's good enough for regular proofreading, though I think it sounds better a hair faster than the default speed.

Mac text to speech voices