As with iOS devices, it is possible to have your Mac speak texts. In this tip article, we’ll show you how to use this handy feature.
Text-to-speech: this is how you set it up
Speaking text is useful when you have trouble reading, or just like to listen to a piece of news being read in the background. On the Mac, the function is called ‘Text-to-speech’, with which you can have selected texts in, for example, Safari or Chrome spoken by a computer voice. Before you can use Text-to-Speech, you must first activate the feature. Do this by going through the following steps.
- Open the System Preferences and click on the ‘Dictation & Speech’ menu at the bottom.
- Then make sure that you have enabled the option ‘Speak selected text when pressing a key combination’;
- Close the screen and open your favorite browser.
That is how it works
Once you have enabled Text-to-Speech, you can activate the feature by simply pressing the key combination Option (Alt) + Esc to push. Of course it is important to select a piece of text, such as a specific paragraph or an entire article. After this, your Mac will read it to you in Dutch.
Set voice and key combination
In the ‘Dictation and speech’ menu you will find some useful options. For example, if you don’t like the standard system voice to listen to, you can easily choose a new one. With ‘System voice’ it is possible to select a female Dutch voice, for example.
Finally, you have the option to customize the Text-to-Speech keyboard shortcut. To do this, you need to click on ‘Edit key…’ and then enter a key combination yourself.
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