How to customize announcements and hints for VoiceOver on Mac
Learn how to hear announcements and hints when using VoiceOver on Mac. You can enable, disable, and customize what’s spoken.
Text-to-speech
How to add your own pronunciations on iPhone and iPad
When it comes to using the accessibility features on iPhone and iPad, there are times when you need to make some tweaks. For spoken content it could be the speaking rate or the voice you hear. With this, have there ever been times when things didn’t sound quite right?
A great example is if you have one of those family names that no one seems to pronounce correctly. I’ve been there and it can be annoying.
Luckily, you can fix this on your iPhone and iPad with custom pronunciations. If there’s a word or phrase that you want to hear spoken a specific way, you can add it to your device and from then on, hear it pronounced the way you want. Here’s how to add your own pronunciations on iOS.
How to receive typing feedback on iPhone and iPad
Learn how to set up Typing Feedback on iPhone or iPad to have the characters and words you type spoken out loud; ideal for visual impairments.
Siri voice in Germany gets a quality boost thanks to machine learning
Siri in Germany appears to have finally received upgraded voices but it’s a way overdue update, arriving almost three years after the English voices were significantly improved via the iOS 11 update, which launched back in 2017.
How to have your Mac announce alerts and speak text
If you’re interested in having your Mac announce alerts or speak text to you, you have some great accessibility features to help.
iOS 14: downloadable custom voice synthesizers to replace built-in speech voices
iOS 14 could let you replace the default Siri voice feedback with something a bit more punchy, like a custom voice synthesizers for “Space Odyssey”‘s HAL 9000 computer.
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
In this tutorial, you will learn how to convert any highlighted body of text into a spoken iTunes audio track on your Mac.
Make your Mac speak with a simple Terminal command
It’s possible to force your Mac to say anything you want with a simple command line from the Termimal app. In this short tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to make your Mac say whatever you want it to with the Terminal app that comes preinstalled on every installation of macOS.
