Select the Speak Selected Text When the Key Is Pressed checkbox to add a shortcut for Text to Speech. By default, it’s Option-Esc. Change it by clicking Change Key and adding your own. Have Your Mac Announce Alerts. Select the Announce When Alerts Are Displayed checkbox to have your Mac tell you when an alert appears on-screen.
Touch-screen keyboards can be slow, especially on phones with small screens. To enter text more naturally, you can use your phone or tablet’s voice dictation feature. Just speak — punctuation included — and your device will convert what you say to text.
This works in other languages than English. In fact, it can even be more useful with non-English languages. For example, you can speak a language that requires accents or a larger alphabet of characters to save time over tapping them in.
Android
To use voice dictation on Android, open any app and bring up a keyboard by tapping in a text field you want to type in. Tap the microphone icon at the bottom-left corner of your keyboard.
Just start speaking to use voice dictation. Android will insert the words as you speak them.
Bear in mind that it won’t automatically insert punctuation for you. You’ll need to speak the punctuation mark you want to use. For example, if you’d like to type “I’m good. How are you doing?”, you’d need to speak the words “I’m good period how are you doing question mark.”
Here are the handful of voice dictation commands that work on Android:
Unfortunately, Android’s list of voice dictation commands is very limited compared to the comprehensive set available on iPhone and iPad.
RELATED:5 Android Keyboard Replacements to Help You Type Faster
Android’s voice dictation is good for conversational messages, such as text messages, searches, emails, tweets, and quick notes. Attempt to use it for documents with complex formatting or symbols and you’ll have some problems. There’s no voice command to go back and delete a word, so you’d have to tap the Delete button or go back and edit your text afterwards.
We used the Google Keyboard here, but you can install other keyboards on Android to get different voice dictation engines. For example, the Swype keyboard includes integrated Dragon Dictation features.
iPhone and iPad
On an iPhone or iPad, bring up the keyboard in any app and tap the microphone icon to the left of the space bar to start using voice dictation. Because it interprets your voice, Apple refers to this feature as part of Siri.
Command Key On Windows Keyboard
You’ll see a Siri prompt and you can start speaking immediately. Words won’t appear as you speak. Instead, you’ll need to speak your message and then tap Done. After you do, the words you spoke will appear in the text field.
Just as with Android, Siri won’t automatically insert punctuation marks. To enter “Hello, how are you? I’m doing well.” you’d have to speak the words “Hello comma how are you question mark I’m doing well period.”
Here are the voice dictation commands that work on an iPhone or iPad. We tried to arrange them in a quick list you can easily skim, but you can also find the list in longer form on Apple’s website:
iOS also gives you much more control over formatting:
List Of Mac Keyboard Commands
Compared to Android, iOS offers much more fine-grained control over voice dictation. However, there’s still no “backspace”, “delete”, or “undo” command that you can speak to undo any mistakes you make while speaking. You’ll have to go and edit your message afterwards to perform any corrections.
Remember that speaking clearly is very important. Obviously, voice dictation will work best in a quiet room and very poorly on a noisy street.
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Command Shortcuts For Mac
Make your Mac read to you. Whether you want to hear an article while you do something else or want another voice to read your writing back to you for proofreading purposes, OS X comes with everything you need.
James pointed out how you can download the Siri voice for MacHow To Get the Siri Voice & Make Her Say Whatever You WantHow To Get the Siri Voice & Make Her Say Whatever You WantWhether you're creating audio clips for your own weekly technology podcast, or looking to write your own Siri spoof videos - having the Siri voice on your Mac is awesome. Let me show you how...Read More and make her say anything you want, but what he didn’t point out is how easy it is to use this and other voices to listen to articles or proofread your work. With a simple keyboard shortcut you can tell your Mac to read any highlighted text, and in other programs you just tell your app to start reading.
Even better: with Mavericks you can download a variety of high-quality voices with a variety of regional accents, from the UK to Australia, and India to South Africa. It’s yet another overlooked feature of MavericksSecrets of OS X Mavericks: What You Really Need To KnowSecrets of OS X Mavericks: What You Really Need To KnowYou probably already know about the major features of the latest, free upgrade for Mac OS X. Here are the hidden ones.Read More.
Using Your Mac’s Speech Function
The Speech feature on your Mac is something you’ve probably seen in the menu, but never thought to actually click. In most programs (but not all), hit “Edit” in the menubar. You should see a Speech menu, that looks like this:
Click Start Speaking and your Mac will start reading whatever’s open using its default voice. It’s just that simple.
You can create a keyboard shortcut for this, if you want. Just head to Keyboard settings in your Mac’s System Preferences panel. Head to Shortcuts, then to the App Shortcuts option in the left panel.
From here you can create a keyboard shortcut for anything that shows up in the menu in any program. Create a new shortcut, for All Applications, and name it Start Speaking. Then add whatever keyboard shortcut you prefer.
Add another shortcut for stopping, if you want. You can also add a keyboard shortcut for reading any selected text, but we’ll get to that later.
What Can I Use This For?
Okay, so a talking computer is cool – and extremely useful if you happen to be blind – but what can the rest of us use this for?
Multitasking, for one thing. Say there are a variety of articles you need to read, but you also need to do some graphic design work. Get your Mac to read the articles to you and you can absorb the information while getting your design work done.
But the real breakthrough, for me, was using this service to proofread my work. When reading back over a piece of work, your brain skips over some of the mistakes you make – no matter how many times you read your writing. Hearing someone else read it, however, makes these mistakes obvious. Hearing a voice read your work – even a computerized one – can help you spot typos and more.
This could work for blog posts, school or college papers, especially large email messages, covering letters and anywhere accuracy comes especially valued.
Finding Your Voice
Okay, so now you know how to make your Mac start reading any text. But can you control what the voice sounds like? Yes. Head back to System Preferences, and this time choose the Dictation And Speech option:
Click the Text To Speech toggle and you’ll see the following options:
The default voice, Tom, is great – but you might want something else. Click the drop down menu and you will see a few choices, and you can get even more by clicking the Customize option. The first thing you’ll see is a collection of international accents:
Some of these voices are pretty good, so check them out. Below this you’ll find a variety of American voices – some nicer than others. This video provides an overview of most of the older options:
Talk To Text Google
Note that a few of the newer, high-quality voices aren’t included in the above video – including the voice of Siri, named Samantha on the Mac. The high quality voices will take a while to download – they’re around 300 megabytes – but if you like the sound of the preview, it will probably be worth it.
A lot of simple voices are in-built, including a variety of really silly ones. These voices date back to the 1990s, or even earlier, by way of a program called MacInTalk. The features of this program were folded into Mac OS in the late nineties, and a few of them have become famous along the way. As an example, “Ralph” should sound familiar to anyone who’s seen the movie Wall-E. Take the time to explore the options – I think you’re going to like them.
While you’re in the settings, feel free to set a keyboard shortcut for speaking the currently selected text. You can also have your Mac read the time on the half hour.
Other Ways To Use These Voices
There are a few other ways to use these voices. Perhaps the simplest is using the Terminal: all you need to do is type “say” followed by what you’d like your Mac to say.
This is fun in and of itself, but you could also put it to work if you wanted. You could, for example, use the “sleep” command to tell your Mac to “say” something at some point in the future. For example:
sleep 25m; say take a break
Would cause your Mac to say “take a break” in 25 minutes. You could use this as an improvised Pomodoro timer.
If you’d rather not mess with the command line, and just want to make your Mac say things, you could download an app like Toau. It’s quite nice, and offers a pause button for reading. Alternatively, you could use the free app text2speech, which also works.
Yesterday’s Future, Today
Ever since Star Trek it’s been a science fiction trope: computers that talk to you. The reality is we have this technology today, but rarely use it. If you’re a Windows user who feels left out don’t worry: there are ways to make your Windows computer talk to you5 Ways to Make Your Computer Read Documents to You5 Ways to Make Your Computer Read Documents to YouCan you make your computer read aloud to you? Of course! Try these text-to-speech methods and tools on your PC.Read More.
Is the Mac’s text to speech functionality a valuable feature, or just a gimmick? Share your thoughts and use-case scenarios in the comments, below.
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