Text-to-speech

How to customize announcements and hints for VoiceOver on Mac

VoiceOver Utility Announcements

One of the features of VoiceOver on Mac is the ability to hear announcements spoken to you. This can include everything from when a system dialog box displays to when you enable caps lock. In addition, you can hear hints like when an item has a Help tag.

Luckily, you can customize what you want to hear and how you want to hear it in just a few clicks. Here are the options for announcements and hints using VoiceOver on your Mac.

Head of Apple’s speech team explains how Siri learns new languages

Just how exactly does Siri learn a new language? In today's interview with Reuters, Apple's speech team head Alex Acero offered a behind-the-scenes look at how Siri is being taught new languages, a process that involves script-writing, capturing voices in multiple accents and dialects and using machine learning and artificial intelligence to build and evolve new language models over time. The system requires a team of people tasked with reading passages of manually transcribed text.

Before actually updating Siri, Apple first rolls out Dictation support for a new language.

Siri currently speaks 21 languages in 36 countries. By comparison, Microsoft's Cortana supports eight languages tailored for thirteen countries, Google Assistant speaks four languages while Amazon's Alexa works only in English and German.

How to convert text into a spoken iTunes track on Mac

Whenever you want to save a block of important text to your Mac, you probably copy and paste it into the Notes app or into a text editor to save it as a text document. But, did you know you could save any body of text on your Mac as a spoken iTunes track instead?

In this tutorial, you will learn how to convert any highlighted body of text into a spoken iTunes audio track.