Macworld Forums: How to change the Mac's system voice - Macworld Forums

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I've had problems with the Nuance voices - they can cause recognition on the Mac to freeze:

https://discussions....502462#16502462

Changing to the standard built-in voices will solve the problem, but they don't sound as real. It would be great if this bug could get squashed.

Think these will be available with Siri next?

Select Everything vs Select Nothing

In Lion (not sure about the other OSs), if you select nothing, in most applications it will read the whole thing. This is often much better than selecting everything or clicking on "Select All". By not selecting anything, then commanding your Mac to speak, it will edit what it feels is extraneous info. Try this on an email. It will give you basic info in the header, but not everything. It is much like having your friend read it aloud. If your Mac can't determine if something is important, it will default to reading everything. If nothing else, it saves a step if you want the entire page spoken.

I and many of my friends use the Speak function on long articles, especially technical ones, as it helps to improve comprehension without re-reading it. If you couple this with the Safari's "Reader" function to isolate the main text, you're just 2 clicks from having the whole article read to you more like a person than a computer.

A bit off topic...
Your Mac is rather intelligent. It can pronounce things like numbers, amounts, and abbreviations. Have it speak this... "On 12/4/2011 at 2:34am, $808,990,456,234,870,000,335.98 was the 4th check sent to Dr. Wolf and Fr. Giuseppe Esposito near Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg Lake in Massachusetts, to find a cure for Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Unfortunately, Mr. and Mrs. Finnimbrun from Brighton, received only £45.07 due to exchange rates."
Each Mac voice has regional pronunciation variations.

Very cool! Thanks!

Fiona (Scotts) is very realistic, and so is Karen (supposedly Aussie).

Every time I try to download new voices through Lion's System Preferences, I go through the long download process and then I get the error:

The update "Multi-Lingiual" voices can't be installed. The update could not be verified, It may have been corrupted during downloading. The update will be downloaded and checked again the next time that Software Update runs.

Never happens.

if you go to "Voiceover Utility" in the Utilities folder, you will find much more features like how to change pitch, rate and intonation of a specific voice.

How do you delete a downloaded voice?