Long Nguyen

Let Your Computer Read for You

There are thousands and thousands of news articles every day. Much of that content is very interesting, but we are constantly doing something else instead of reading. What about listening? Can we listen to all that news while doing something else?

Google Reader always has something new to show me. I have marked hundreds of articles to read later, but never read them, because I do something else instead.

I once told a friend that I would love to have a hot P.A. whose only task would be to read me the news. Since I can’t afford one yet, I have found another to listen to written news instead of having to read it. The solution is built right in Mac OS X Leopard: Text-to-Speech.

In System Preferences, in the System row, click on Speech and you will enter a magical world where you have options regarding speech recognition and text-to-speech. Speech recognition doesn’t work very well and it’s another subject, so just know that it exists.

Text-to-speech, on the other hand, works rather well, in English. Normally, you don’t have I turn anything on or set anything up (verify). You can just select any text that you want to listen to and have your Mac read it to you by pressing Shift+Esc. It is as simply as that.

You have a selection voices that are very mechanical and robotic. On Leopard, there is a voice named Alex, that sounds less like a robot. It’s by using tools like this one, that you really grasp the importance of proper punctuation in every written work.

I don’t know what the equivalent would be for Windows users, but I am certain that it isn’t a built-in feature. If you know which Windows software can read text, share it in the comments.