Mac OS X voices for using with the ‘say’ command
A neat trick if you have a Mac OS X machine is to do this (make sure your speakers are turned on):
- Open Terminal.app
- 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.
9 thoughts on “Mac OS X voices for using with the ‘say’ command”
Victoria is a hottie!
You also may want to check out the free demo download and super high quality voices offered by the folks that produce iVox. The British and Spanish American are quite amazing.
http://www.assistiveware.com/voicedownload.php
Click on the download for the American Voices, or even just listen to the amazing sounds of various samples. This stuff will blow you away, WAY better than the stocks voices that Apple ships.
A great idea is to ssh into a mac and use this function. Freaks people out!
Gabriel, thanks so much for your list!
Figured I’d post this little regex’d version, paste the following into terminal for a cast of characters:
say -v Agnes “Hi, my name is Agnes”
say -v Kathy “Hi, my name is Kathy”
say -v Princess “Hi, my name is Princess”
say -v Vicki “Hi, my name is Vicki”
say -v Victoria “Hi, my name is Victoria”
say -v Bruce “Hi, my name is Bruce”
say -v Fred “Hi, my name is Fred”
say -v Junior “Hi, my name is Junior”
say -v Ralph “Hi, my name is Ralph”
say -v Albert “Hi, my name is Albert”
say -v “Bad News” “Hi, my name is Bad News”
say -v Bahh “Hi, my name is Bahh”
say -v Bells “Hi, my name is Bells”
say -v Boing “Hi, my name is Boing”
say -v Bubbles “Hi, my name is Bubbles”
say -v Cellos “Hi, my name is Cellos”
say -v Deranged “Hi, my name is Deranged”
say -v “Good News” “Hi, my name is Good News”
say -v Hysterical “Hi, my name is Hysterical”
say -v “Pipe Organ” “Hi, my name is Pipe Organ”
say -v Trinoids “Hi, my name is Trinoids”
say -v Whisper “Hi, my name is Whisper”
say -v Zarvox “Hi, my name is Zarvox”
for v in `say -v ? | awk ‘{print $1}’`
do
say -v $v “Hi, my name is $v”
done
What does that say in english
This one
$ say -v ‘?’ | sed ‘s/ *en_US.*$//’ | while read v; do say -v $v “Hi, my name is $v”; done
also deals correctly with names containing blanks.