A neat trick if you have a Mac OS X machine is to do this (make sure your speakers are turned on):

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type in at the command line: say hello world

This will make your computer say “hello world” in the default voice (Victoria).

Here is a list of the other voices you can also use:

Female Voices

• $ say -v Agnes "hello world"
• $ say -v Kathy "hello world"
• $ say -v Princess "hello world"
• $ say -v Vicki "hello world"
• $ say -v Victoria "hello world"

Male Voices

• $ say -v Bruce "hello world"
• $ say -v Fred "hello world"
• $ say -v Junior "hello world"
• $ say -v Ralph "hello world"

Novelty Voices

• $ say -v Albert "hello world"
• $ say -v "Bad News" "hello world"
• $ say -v Bahh "hello world"
• $ say -v Bells "hello world"
• $ say -v Boing "hello world"
• $ say -v Bubbles "hello world"
• $ say -v Cellos "hello world"
• $ say -v Deranged "hello world"
• $ say -v "Good News" "hello world"
• $ say -v Hysterical "hello world"
• $ say -v "Pipe Organ" "hello world"
• $ say -v Trinoids "hello world"
• $ say -v Whisper "hello world"
• $ say -v Zarvox "hello world"

Have fun. You can now add voices to your monitoring applications, or freak people out if they don’t know about this cool trick.

To learn about all of the functionality of the say program, type in man say in Terminal to learn more, or click here to view the online man page for say.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Development, Funny, How To, Mac OS X, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.