Hi Phil, One of the useful Services menu options is "Add to iTunes as Spoken Track". It allows you to highlight a text file selection then have that file turned into an audio file that gets added to iTunes. If you want to control the speaking rate, though, you'll need to have a string at the beginning of the file to put in the speech rate controls within a double set of brackets at the start of the file, as in:
[[rate 300]] That's two left brackets (where left bracket is the key to the right of the "p" key), the word "rate", a space, and a number which is the words per minute, then two right brackets. In the example used above, the rate is 300 words per minute. I think George was asking about this on list yesterday. I think you need to check this as one of your active Services, but I don't recall the default settings, since I have this checked under my Services. You can find out your checked Services menu options by navigating to the menu bar (Control-F2 or VO-M), right arrow to your current application (e.g., could be "Mail" if you're reading this post), press "s" to move to "Services", right arrow to the submenu, Command-down arrow to the end of the Services sub-menu, which should be "Services Preferences…" and press return. This puts you into the correct tab of the keyboard shortcuts under System Preferences… so you can navigate past the "Shortcuts categories" table (where "Services" will already be selected and highlighted") to the second table of shortcuts for that category. One of the options under the text category is "Add to iTunes as Spoken Track", which you can check, and optionally assign a shortcut key sequence to. You select a text file, then either apply your shortcut, or navigate to the Services menu in the menu bar and select "Add to iTunes as spoken track". Alternatively, you could use Automator and use the "Text to Audio File" action, which lets you select a voice, and was a way this could be done before there was a services menu option. If you want to learn more about the command arguments that can be used to control speech, check out the guide at the Apple Developer's Web site for information on how to embed commands into the text to speed it up or change other attributes: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SpeechSynthesisProgrammingGuide/index.html Embedded commands are described in the section titled "Techniques for Customizing Synthesized Speech" > "Use Embedded Speech Commands to Fine-Tune Spoken Output". There are a number of four-letter commands in addition to "rate" that will let you do things like increase or decrease volume ("volm"), change the way numbers are spoken ("nmbr" with the LTRL argument to speak digit by digit, as in phone numbers, or with the NORM argument to go back to the default mode). They can all be used together, enclose within two left and two right brackets, and separated by semi-colons. You have to read the strings character by character to hear the arguments. If you're comfortable using the Terminal command line, you can test out commands on speech strings by enclosing them in quotation marks, and using the unix "say" command. Note that embedded commands cannot be used to select a voice, although the "v" switch of the "say" command can accept an argument for the voice. For example, here's the command to get Fred rather than Alex, speaking fast at slightly boosted volume, with the "say" command. Open up Terminal, paste the string in, and press "return" to hear the results: say -v Fred "[[rate 400; volm +0.2]]Am I speaking too fast?" HTH. Cheers, Esther On Mar 23, 2013, at 2:30 PM, Phil Halton wrote: > is it the case that you can have a text document read by VoiceOver and added > as a audio file to iTunes? > > How exactly is that accomplished? > <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml> As the Mac Access Dot Net administrators, we do our very best to ensure that the Mac-Access E-Mal list remains malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free. However, this should in no way replace your own security strategy. We assume neither liability nor responsibility should something unpredictable happen. Please remember to update your membership preferences periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
