Mac Os Library Speech
Jul 25, 2011 Click on “Dictation & Speech” under the System items, then click on “Text to Speech” Select the System Voice menu and scroll to “Customize” in the pull-down Choose the voice or voices you want to add to Mac OS X by clicking the checkbox next to the name, you can play samples by selecting them and clicking “Play”. Apple Developer Documentation. Browse the latest developer documentation including API reference, articles, and sample code. Feb 23, 2008 If the former is sufficient for you, you can use AppleScript to write the actions that you want to perform, then save the script in /Library/Speech/Speakable Items folder. The file name you assign to the file is the command you need to speak to have the OS take action.
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.
Speech Recognition lets you issue verbal commands such as “Get my mail!” to your Mac and have it actually get your email. You can also create AppleScripts and Automator workflows, and Finder Quick Actions (a new Mojave feature) and trigger them by voice. May 14, 2013 One way to do this is to get rid of the voices that Mac OS X uses for text-to-speech. These files can take up a decent amount of space, which may well be why iOS only allows the one onboard, now. Download Speech Central: Text to Speech for macOS 10.13 or later and enjoy it on your Mac. Bookshare, an accessible online library is integrated into the app. The widest selection of keyboard shortcuts to control the speed and position of how the text is read aloud. Nsss - NSSpeechSynthesizer on Mac OS X 10.5 and higher sapi5 - SAPI5 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, and (untested) Windows 7 espeak - eSpeak on any distro / platform that can host the shared library (e.g., Ubuntu / Fedora Linux).
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.
Thank you for your consideration!
Where is library on mac os sierra 10 13. Click “Continue.”9.
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.
The Cocoa interface to speech recognition in macOS.
Framework
- AppKit
Declaration
Overview
NSSpeechRecognizer
provides a “command and control” style of voice recognition system, where the command phrases must be defined prior to listening, in contrast to a dictation system where the recognized text is unconstrained. Through an NSSpeechRecognizer
instance, Cocoa apps can use the speech recognition engine built into macOS to recognize spoken commands. With speech recognition, users can accomplish complex tasks with spoken commands—for example, “Move pawn B2 to B4” and “Take back move.”
The NSSpeechRecognizer
class has a property that lets you specify which spoken words should be recognized as commands (commands
) and methods that let you start and stop listening (startListening()
and stopListening()
). When the speech recognition facility recognizes one of the designated commands, NSSpeechRecognizer
invokes the delegation method speechRecognizer(_:didRecognizeCommand:)
, allowing the delegate to perform the command.
Speech recognition is just one of the macOS speech technologies. The speech synthesis technology allows applications to “pronounce” written text in U.S. English and over 25 other languages, with a number of different voices and dialects for each language (NSSpeechSynthesizer
is the Cocoa interface to this technology). Both speech technologies provide benefits for all users, and are particularly useful to those users who have difficulties seeing the screen or using the mouse and keyboard. By incorporating speech into your application, you can provide a concurrent mode of interaction for your users: In macOS, your software can accept input and provide output without requiring users to change their working context.
Topics
Speech To Text Software Mac
init?()
Initializes and returns an instance of the NSSpeechRecognizer
class.
var delegate: NSSpeechRecognizerDelegate?
protocol NSSpeechRecognizerDelegate
A set of optional methods implemented by delegates of NSSpeechRecognizer
objects.
var commands: [String]?
An array of strings defining the commands for which the speech recognizer object should listen.
var displayedCommandsTitle: String?
The title of the commands section in the Speech Commands window or nil
if there is no title.
var listensInForegroundOnly: Bool
A Boolean value that indicates whether the speech recognizer object should only enable its commands when its application is the frontmost one.
var blocksOtherRecognizers: Bool
A Boolean value that indicates whether the speech recognizer object should block all other recognizers (that is, other applications attempting to understand spoken commands) when listening.
func startListening()
Tells the speech recognition engine to begin listening for commands.
func stopListening()
Mac Os Library Speech Examples
Tells the speech recognition engine to suspend listening for commands.
Relationships
- ,
- ,
See Also
class NSSpeechSynthesizer
The Cocoa interface to speech synthesis in macOS.