Did you know that you can change narrators automatically when you're using GhostReader? It's an undocumented feature, and only works with the voices from Infovox iVox or ConvenienceWare, but I've confirmed that it does work.

The biggest catch is that you can only switch between voices which are the same voice type and the same voice category. The voice type is either 'Infovox iVox' or 'ConvenienceWare', the ConvenienceWare voices can only be used within GhostReader whereas the iVox voices can be used with any programs. The voice categories are 'HD' and 'HQ' or 'HQM' (these two appear to be the same). To find out which voices are in which category, look on these pages:

• ConvenienceWare Voices lists the category and gender in brackets for each ConvenienceWare voice.
• Infovox iVox Voices does the same for the iVox voices.

We can see from this, for example, that the American English voices "Heather", "Laura", "Ryan", "Kenny", and "Nelly" are all HQ/HQM voices so we can swap between these.

To do the voice change, you put this command in your text:

\vce=speaker=newspeaker\

Instead of the word "newspeaker" you need to use the name of the voice you want, but the rest has to be exact - including the last backslash. So if you're using American English voices, try using this text:

\vce=speaker=heather\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=ryan\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=laura\I will come along too.

It will start out with Heather, then switch to Ryan and then to Laura. If you have the British English voices, you could use this text instead instead:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.

I only own the British English InfoVox iVox voices so I haven't tried to see if this works when switching between languages. If it does, it could be a really useful thing for when you have a document that changes from one language to another.

Remember, this is an undocumented command, and the speech synthesis system doesn't really "know" you've changed voices so it won't automatically change back to your default voice for more speech afterwards. For example, my default system voice is Peter, but after using the snippet above (which finishes with Graham speaking) any speech synthesis afterwards will still use the Graham voice. To fix this, add another switching command for your default system voice at the end of your document. So to switch back to my default Peter voice, the above text becomes this:

\vce=speaker=Lucy\Are you coming along? \vce=speaker=Peter\Sure I am, I'd love to! \vce=speaker=Graham\I will come along too.\vce=speaker=Peter\

It doesn't matter that there's no text after the last voice switch, it just tells the speech synth to switch back to Peter. So when my computer next announces the time, or I ask it to speak a block of text, it will be back to speaking in the Peter voice.

Can you think of any fun uses for this? Leave a comment!

- Ricky Buchanan

We've already seen that you can use OS X's built in text-to-speech just by selecting a key combination to use with it, so why pay money for Narrator? There is one feature that Narrator has that no other text-to-speech software has - easy in-line voice switching. You set a marker and it changes to the selected voice at that point while reading.

Use Narrator to read out a play or story with different voices for each of the parts. It uses speech synthesis to read out marked passages using specified voice attributes. You can choose different voices, rates, pitches, inflections, and volumes for each character in the story. The words are highlighted on-screen, and there are also a couple of silent read-along options for stage directions, or for you to read out your own parts.

Starting with version 2, you can have multiple chapters in each document to help organize the story, use a word replacement dictionary to fine-tune the pronunciation, and can export the story as an AAC sound file or export it to iTunes, so you can listen on an iPod or iPhone, just like your own audiobook! Plus many other appearance and functionality improvements.

In my testing I found that Narrator has some trouble with Infovox iVox voices - the highlighting of words as they are spoken breaks down if it reaches a section set to use an iVox voice and doesn't always get back in synchronisation afterwards, and the "pitch" and "inflection" sliders slide around but don't do anything. To my knowledge, none of the Infovox iVox voices can have their pitch or inflection altered, so the sliders shouldn't be available for these voices. These problems didn't happen with the Apple or Cepstral voices that I tried, but the Cepstral voices are generally of a lower quality than the Infovox iVox voices so I found it disappointing that these didn't work. Perhaps this will be fixed in a future version.

- Ricky Buchanan

Cepstral have announced version 5 of their text-to-speech voices, but I have found little detail about the improvements. The following quote is from the website:

Version 5 is finally here, and it includes improvements to voice quality and engine efficiency.

This is a paid upgrade with the usual price of US$30 per voice reduced for any voice you already have a license for. When I entered the license information for the US "David" voice that I own I was informed that the upgrade price would be US$10 but no general upgrade prices have been announced, so other voices may cost different amounts to upgrade. If anybody has further information, please leave a comment.

Website: Cepstral Text-to-Speech

- Ricky Buchanan (still working on my health mostly, but couldn't resist posting this!)

Did you know that there is a very simple way to get your Mac to speak pretty much any piece of text without having to install any extra software or learn complicated commands? There is.

Open System Preferences - it's the fourth item in the Apple menu (the  shape) in the very top left corner of the screen. In the "System" section, usually about the fourth line of icons in System Preferences, there is an icon labeled "Speech" which looks like an old fashioned radio microphone. Click on the Speech icon.

The Speech pane has sections labeled "Speech Recognition" and "Text to Speech". Click on the "Text to Speech" section and you'll see the option to "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" - select that option.

Now hit the "Set key" button beside it to set a key combination to trigger the speaking. I use command-control-option-S because it's not used for anything else, and I can remember "S for speak" more easily than any other letter:

You can select any key combination that isn't already used for something else. Now all you need to do is select some text in an application - I suggest you try it first with Safari or Text Edit - and hit your keys and you should hear Mac OS X read out whatever you have selected!

You can also use the top section of the system preferences Speech pane to select a system voice that you find easiest to listen to. If you use the voices a lot you may eventually choose to purchase a higher quality system voice or one that speaks your language.

- Ricky Buchanan

When an application needs your attention Mac OS X often gives no visible sign at all. An application "needing attention", in Apple's language, is one that's waiting for you to tell it something before it can keep going and isn't the app you're currently working with. It could be Safari wanting you to confirm that you want it to quit the application, or TextEdit waiting for you to tell it a filename so it can save your word processing file, or anything else that the computer can't do on its own.

Here's how to set things up so the computer will use the system voice to tell you that an alert is being displayed, and which application is displaying it.

Open System Preferences - it's the fourth item in the Apple menu (the  shape) in the very top left corner of the screen as shown here:

In the "System" section, usually about the fourth line of icons in System Preferences, there is an icon labeled "Speech" which looks like an old fashioned radio microphone. Click on the Speech icon.

The Speech pane has sections labeled "Speech Recognition" and "Text to Speech". Click on the "Text to Speech" section and you'll see the option to announce when an application requires your attention - select that option.

You can also use the top section of this pane to select a system voice that you find easiest to listen to. If you use the voices a lot you may eventually choose to purchase a higher quality system voice or one that speaks your language.

- Ricky Buchanan