How to Add High-Quality New Text-to-Speech Voices to Mac OS X

If you're a Mac user, you may be aware that there are other voice options available in many different versions of MacOS and Mac OS X. While the Speech control panel is labeled as 'Dictation and Speech' in new versions of macOS and 'Speech' in older versions of Mac OS X, the voices themselves have been available in various forms since Lion was first released.

To add these high-quality new text-to-speech voices to your Mac, you'll need to be running MacOS 10.7 or later. This includes everything from Mavericks to High Sierra, Mojave, and onward. Once you've added a few of the new voices, you can test them out with larger phrases, documents, or whatever else you want spoken using standard text-to-speech methods.

There are several ways to add these new voices to your Mac. You can do so through compatible apps like TextEdit and Safari, or by using the command-line 'say' utility. Alternatively, you can use the VoiceOver Utility, but going through System Preferences dedicated Speech/Dictation control panel is the easiest way.

When adding new voices, keep in mind that each high-quality voice is a hefty download, so if you have limited disk space, it's best to pick one or two voices rather than adding them all, which can take up several GB of data. You can add as many voices as you like, but be mindful of storage capacity on your Mac.

To get started, follow these steps:

1. Click on the 'System Preferences' icon in the Apple menu.

2. Select the 'Dictation & Speech' option under the System items.

3. Click on the 'Text to Speech' option.

4. In the VoiceOver Utility window, click on the 'Customize' option in the pull-down menu.

5. Scroll down and select the 'New Voices' option.

6. Choose the voice or voices you want to add to your Mac by clicking the checkbox next to the name. You can play samples by selecting them and clicking 'Play'.

7. Click 'OK' to confirm that you want to add the new voice(s) to your Mac.

8. Click 'Install' to proceed with the download.

9. Choose Tessa, the South African English voice, or select another voice of your choice.

Once the voices have downloaded, they will become a selectable option in the Voice menu. With these high-quality new text-to-speech voices, you can enjoy better reading experiences and more accurate speech recognition on your Mac.

Osx text to speech