At this meeting, held on 16th May, Robert talked about text to speech options on the Mac. Members also brought up several other topics.
Text to Speech
Robert talked about various options for reading text such as notes, documents and books aloud on the Mac. This included:
- Using the built-in Accessibility Spoken Content options to speak on screen text including from Notes and PDFs in Preview.
- While exploring the available voices, Ben noted that many classic voices (such as Zarvox) from as far back as 1995 are still available.
- The “say” terminal command can be used to read text from text files and directly record it into an audio file for future use.
- Third party services offer higher quality voices but usually require a subscription. Robert demonstrated NaturalReader.
- We also talked about Personal Voice which can learn and recreate your own voice. This can be used in Live Speech and other communication apps but not for speaking content.
- Personal voice is being enhanced in iOS 19 to greatly reduce the amount of time needed to set it up.
Member Topics
- Ben talked about Air Tags and their many useful features including being notified when one is left behind, precision finding, sharing an AirTag so people you know can help locate it, and lost mode so strangers can help return it.
- Ben mentioned that PDFs can be compressed on iOS to reduce their file size. This is especially useful on PDFs created using Notes scanner feature that can be very large. This can also be done in Preview on Mac.
- Ben had recently added a hardback copy of the book Make Something Wonderful: Steve jobs in his own words to his Apple collection. This is rare as it was only gifted to Apple and Disney employees.
- DavidB mentioned Tim Cook’s comments on the effects of tariffs in the US on Apple’s costs and pricing.
- DavidB also brought up this tip from Mac Rumors on a way to take iphone photos with your voice. We also discussed taking photos using Siri.
- DaveK mentioned using Sign-in with Apple to simplify website logins.