Download: SayIt!
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I recently purchased an Apple Wireless Keyboard. With it I have been actively using my living room Mac hooked up to my HDTV.
But I am noticing one annoyance with the experience of using living room computer; Reading text on the HDTV sucks.
There is something excruciating about reading webpage texts on my HDTV. No matter how much I blow up the text I just can’t do it.
So I proceeded to write a two-liner (literally) AppleScript applet that solves the problem by executing Mac OS X’s built-in speech synthesis against the text on the clipboard. For the record, I am sure someone else’s already done this in a more elegant manner. Those didn’t make it easy for me to find the solution, so I proceeded to write my own.
Here’s the concept. Every Mac OS X comes with a speech synthesis engine which converts a text into an audio output and basically reads it to you. Many people are familiar with the concept but not many even know that such a service exists on their Macs. You can actually find this service under the application menu >> Services >> Speech >> Start Speaking Text. For instance, just highlight text in Safari, then select Start Speaking Text menu item. OS will convert the text into audio for you. But if you are like me, you don’t like to use the mouse and move through multilevels of submenus to get to this service. This is where the lightweight application with no UI comes in handy. You launch it and it reads the text on your clipboard. So whenever you see a text on a webpage or in a Word document, just go ahead and copy the text, then simply launch SayIt! and it will read the text out loud for you.
BTW, I highly recommend using Alex voice on Leopard…
