Help Me With My Mac

This is a lot of fun (and can also freak people out)!  

All Mac’s have a built in Speech Synthesis manager, and you can make your Mac talk by doing this:

1. Click on Spotlight in the Upper Right (or use the keyboard shortcut – Command + Space).
2. Type “Terminal”, you should see the Application “Terminal” become the Top Hit.
3. If Terminal is highlighted, press Return.  If not, select it by using your arrows, and press Return.
4. You should see the Terminal application start, and be dumped at a textual screen prompt.
5. At that prompt, type: say “Hello there” and press Return.
6. You should hear your Mac talk to you.
7. Once you are done, you can either type “exit” and press Return, or use the keyboard shortcut to Quit (Command + Q) Terminal.

The “say” command has more advanced uses too:

• You can have your Mac read a text file to you: say -f filetoread.txt.
• You can have your Mac convert a text file into an audio file: say -o soundfile.aiff -f filetoread.txt.

If you’re feeling really geeky, and want to learn all about the “say” command, type “man say” at the prompt in Terminal — that will open up the manual page of “say”, and teach you all about it!

Enjoy!