Mac lets you convert text to speech using command line utility “say”. It also lets to generate an audio file in various formats and voices. This is pretty handy to generate audio file given the text. Here are couple of ways to use it:

Use say to pronounce “Hello world” with default voice:
Using say with a pause after Hello:
In case you need bigger pause repeat comma e.g.
Using say with voice Alex:
Using say with voice Alex and output audio to a file (default format aiff):

Word for Microsoft 365 Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac Word for the web Dictation lets you use speech-to-text to author content in Office with a microphone and reliable internet connection. It's a quick and easy way to get your thoughts out, create drafts or outlines, and capture notes. Web Windows macOS iOS Android. Word For Mac Speech recognition software allows you to speak commands and create documents on your computer by talking into an attached microphone. With Windows Speech Recognition enabled on your computer, you can use Microsoft Office 2007 to record your voice and translate your words into text.

How To Speak Text On Mac. Microsoft Word has a hidden text-to-speech button built in. To access add the text-to-speech button to the quick access tool bar click on the down arrow in the top left corner of the screen. Next click on more commands and then click on all commands from the drop down menu.
‎.Best Text to Speech App.Millions of Downloads.All Major Languages.Unlimited Usage.Save Frequent Phrases Please leave reviews with feature requests. Instructions: Type in or copy and paste text and listen with human quality text to speech. Simply enter any text and tap speak to instantly.

Sample output for some voices

Here is sample output for text “Using Text to Speech (TTS), you can have Alex and other Mac voices speak selected text so you can hear a word as you see it onscreen.” using various voices:

Word For Mac Text To Speech Pro

Using voice Alex (Male Voice):
Outcome: mac-text-to-speech-tts-demo-alex.aiff
Using voice Bruce (Male Voice):
Outcome: mac-text-to-speech-tts-demo-bruce.aiff
Using voice Victoria (Female Voice):
Outcome: mac-text-to-speech-tts-demo-victoria.aiff

Voices available on your system

Word For Mac Text To Speech App

Voice Alex is one of the most popular voices and you can use it if you don’t want to spend too much time on trying other voices. To see the list of voices available on your system run say -v ?. There are couple of other voices which can be downloaded from Apple’s web site. Here is the default list on Mac OS X 10.7.5 at the time of writing this article.

Output formats

Word For Mac Text To Speech Online

The default output format is aiff. To change the output file format, just change the output file extension. To see the list of output file format available run say --file-format=?. Here is the outcome on Max OS X 10.7.5

e.g. To generate a wave format output file run say 'Hello World' -o out.wave

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In October 2018, Nuance announced that it has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac and will support it for only 90 days from activation in the US or 180 days in the rest of the world. The continuous speech-to-text software was widely considered to be the gold standard for speech recognition, and Nuance continues to develop and sell the Windows versions of Dragon Home, Dragon Professional Individual, and various profession-specific solutions.

This move is a blow to professional users—such as doctors, lawyers, and law enforcement—who depended on Dragon for dictating to their Macs, but the community most significantly affected are those who can control their Macs only with their voices.

What about Apple’s built-in accessibility solutions? macOS does support voice dictation, although my experience is that it’s not even as good as dictation in iOS, much less Dragon Professional Individual. Some level of voice control of the Mac is also available via Dictation Commands, but again, it’s not as powerful as what was available from Dragon Professional Individual.

TidBITS reader Todd Scheresky is a software engineer who relies on Dragon Professional Individual for his work because he’s a quadriplegic and has no use of his arms. He has suggested several ways that Apple needs to improve macOS speech recognition to make it a viable alternative to Dragon Professional Individual:

Support for user-added custom words: Every profession has its own terminology and jargon, which is part of why there are legal, medical, and law enforcement versions of Dragon for Windows. Scheresky isn’t asking Apple to provide such custom vocabularies, but he needs to be able to add custom words to the vocabulary to carry out his work.
Support for speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition: Currently, macOS’s speech recognition is speaker-independent, which means that it works pretty well for everyone. But Scheresky believes it needs to become speaker-dependent, so it can learn from your corrections to improve recognition accuracy. Also, Apple’s speech recognition isn’t continuous—it works for only a few minutes before stopping and needing to be reinvoked.
Support for cursor positioning and mouse button events: Although Scheresky acknowledges that macOS’s Dictation Commands are pretty good and provide decent support for text cursor positioning, macOS has nothing like Nuance’s MouseGrid, which divides the screen into a 3-by-3 grid and enables the user to zoom in to a grid coordinate, then displaying another 3-by-3 grid to continue zooming. Nor does Apple have anything like Nuance’s mouse commands for moving and clicking the mouse pointer.

When Scheresky complained to Apple’s accessibility team about macOS’s limitations, they suggested the Switch Control feature, which enables users to move the pointer (along with other actions) by clicking a switch. He talks about this in a video.

Unfortunately, although Switch Control would let Scheresky control a Mac using a sip-and-puff switch or a head switch, such solutions would be both far slower than voice and a literal pain in the neck. There are some better alternatives for mouse pointer positioning:

Dedicated software, in the form of a $35 app called iTracker.
An off-the-shelf hack using Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
An expensive head-mounted pointing device, although the SmartNav is $600 and the HeadMouse Nano and TrackerPro are both about $1000. It’s also not clear how well they interface with current versions of macOS.

Regardless, if Apple enhanced macOS’s voice recognition in the ways Scheresky suggests, it would become significantly more useful and would give users with physical limitations significantly more control over their Macs… and their lives. If you’d like to help, Scheresky suggests submitting feature request feedback to Apple with text along the following lines (feel free to copy and paste it):

Because Nuance has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, it is becoming difficult for disabled users to use the Mac. Please enhance macOS speech recognition to support user-added custom words, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition that learns from user corrections to improve accuracy, and cursor positioning and mouse button events.

Microsoft Word Mac Text To Speech

Thank you for your consideration!

Word For Mac Text To Speech Program

Thanks for encouraging Apple to bring macOS’s accessibility features up to the level necessary to provide an alternative to Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. Such improvements will help both those who face physical challenges to using the Mac and those for whom dictation is a professional necessity