Clicking on 'Customize' gives you access to the plethora of new optional voices, and you can play previews of each one before downloading them. This will likely be set to 'Alex' by default. In the Speech pane of System Preferences, clicking on the Text to Speech tab gives you an option for 'System Voice' in a pulldown menu.

It's also a bit of a misnomer to say they're 'included' with OS X, as they are not included in the standard Lion install and require a separate download.īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy.

Like a few other features of OS X Lion, Apple hasn't made these new voices easily discoverable unless you know where to look for them. Text-to-speech voices are now available in Arabic, three different Chinese dialects, Czech, Danish, two varieties of Dutch, Finnish, two French dialects, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, two Portuguese dialects, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, two Spanish dialects, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. These new voices, sourced from Nuance, are not only available in several dialects of English but also, in an OS X first, in several other languages. While Alex was a breakthrough for text-to-speech Mac voices at the time, the over 50 new voices included in Lion outmatch him in several key ways. The last major addition to Apple's built-in OS X voices was Alex, a higher-quality voice included in Mac OS X Leopard back in 2007. First announced in March, then found in developer previews, one of the little-heralded new features of OS X Lion is its inclusion of several high-quality text-to-speech voices in 22 different languages.

Mac os x text to speech