Getting your Mac to Speak Large Texts

First of all this tutorial will only be useful if you have a Mac. It also assumes some very basic familiarity with the command line (I won’t explain how to change directories with cd). But, this article will explain a few unix and command line features along the way to help you be more proficient in Unix.

Dependencies

Here are the dependencies used in the article you may or may not need them Depending on how far you choose to go. Expand the below accordions to read what the dependencies are for and for installation instructions.

brew install pandoc

brew install ffmpeg

Intro to Say

Now on to using text to speech commands. The simplest way to use Text To Speech (TTS) on Mac is through the Mac terminal’s say command.

say 'I can say anything'

Alot can be learned from man pages (man is short for manual). Why don’t we look at say’s man page. To get to a commands man page you just type man followed by a space and then the command. (If a command doesn’t have a manual page then you could get some brief help with the command generally by typing the command followed by a space and then the --help flag)

man say

Scroll down to the options and look at some of them. For example we’ll use the -o flag for output and the -v flag for using different voices. When you are done looking at the manual page hit q to close it.

As pointed out by the man page, if you want to know all the voices type use the v flag like so:

say -v ?

Let’s get only the english voices with grep. Here we will use the pipe command which takes the standard output (stdout) from one command which here is the say command and puts it into the standard input (stdin) for the next command which here is the grep command:

say -v ? | grep en_

Let’s try Daniel’s voice.

say -v Daniel Hello, my name is Daniel and I am a British-English voice.

Now we’ll try outputting the voice. The main output type that you can use on the say command has the .aiff extension. Let’s output that last command to a file.

say -o daniel.aiff -v Daniel Hello, my name is Daniel and I am a British-English voice.

The open command will open a file or directory in the default application although you can target a specific application in your applications folder with the -a flag. Let’s open the sound file in quicktime player:

open -a 'Quicktime Player' daniel.aiff

Next if you’re done listening to the file you can remove it with the rm command.

rm daniel.aiff

For a safer alternative to deleting things with rm try just opening the current directory in your finder with the following command and then deleting the file from the finder export const

open .

Don’t forget the . in the above command the . in Unix and Linux stands for the current directory.

Downloading Higher Quality Voices

Some voices (mainly the Siri voices), can’t be used from the say command, but you can download higher quality voices on Mac through the accesibility options which are located at System Preferences > Accessibility > Speech. You then click on the system voice and click customize to download new voices, some of them will let you check a box with downloading a higher quality voice.

Piping a Text File to Text To Speech.

Let’s create a simple text file named helloWorld.txt:

echo 'Hello World is a common first program.' > helloWorld.txt

The > sign is used for file redirection, notice how the arrow points toward the file name and away from the command echo this is because it is redirecting the standard text output from the echo into the file helloWorld.txt.

If we want the say command to use this helloWorld.txt file we can redirect the file into the say commands standard input with the < sign.

say -v Daniel < helloWorld.txt

An alternative to the above command is to pipe from the cat command. Let’s try running cat by itself to see what it outputs the file contents to stdout.

cat helloWorld.txt

Then we can pipe that to the say command.

cat helloWorld.txt | say -v Daniel

Converting a .docx file to Plain Text for TTS.

Pandoc will come in handy now for helping us convert to and from document formats. If you don’t already have it go back to the top in the dependencies.

Let’s get look at the man pages for pandoc real quick. If you scroll down to the ‘Using pandoc’.

man pandoc

In the ‘Using pandoc’ section of the man page it has an example of the most basic and versatile command Pandoc’s example is similar to the below command which converts a .docx file to .txt:

pandoc -o temp.txt input.docx

Pandoc is able to infer the filetype from the extension of the file. Our input file here given as input.docx, which is the first argument after all the options, could be replaced with a file of any of the supported input file types from pandoc .docx, .md, .epub, etc. Similarly the output (signified by the -o flag) can be replaced with a file with filetype allowed by any of the possible output filetypes.

If you looked at your text output file you may notice that it has headings like this:

Example Heading
---------------

This helps pandoc keep the structure of the document between formats, but that won’t be very good for turning the text file into speech, so we can make it plain text instead of markdown/asciidoc (whatever .txt’s are by default) with the -t flag which stands for type. You can consult the man page for pandoc to see all the different types the -t flag can take.

pandoc -t plain -o temp.txt input.docx

If you look at that output it is a nice plain text document that could be useful for text to speech. Let’s speak that ouput.

say -v Daniel -o temp.aiff < temp.txt

Converting the .aiff to .mp3 with ffmpeg

Pandoc is to text documents as ffmpeg is to audio and video files. Meaning using ffmpeg you can take pretty much any audio or video file and convert it to another.

ffmpeg’s api is pretty similar to pandoc’s, but instead of using -o for the output you use -i for the input. Since things like this can make using commands confusing sometimes it is recommended to consult the man page or atleast use the --help flag when your unsure what flags do. You can use the man page for ffmpeg if you want to, but for brevities sake I’ll just show you how to take our temp.aiff file as input and output output.mp3 as output.

ffmpeg -i temp.aiff output.mp3

Putting Everything Together

So let’s put all three commands for TTS in sequence and open Quicktime Player:

pandoc -t plain -o temp.txt input.docx \
    && say -v Daniel -o temp.aiff < temp.txt \
    && ffmpeg -i temp.aiff output.mp3 \
    && rm temp.aiff && rm temp.txt \
    && open -a 'Quicktime Player' output.mp3

One last note in the above code block all you need to supply to the command is some sort of document in place of input.docx and possibly a voice denoted here by say -v Daniel. When the command is done running you’ll get an output.mp3.

Here’s the above code annotated in case you forgot anything:

# Convert doc to plain text
pandoc -t plain -o temp.txt input.docx \
    # Speak the document into a audio file format
    && say -v Daniel -o temp.aiff < temp.txt \
    # Convert to mp3
    && ffmpeg -i temp.aiff output.mp3 \
    # Remove our temp files
    && rm temp.aiff && rm temp.txt \
    # Open quicktime player
    && open -a 'Quicktime Player' output.mp3