Text to Speech Not Working

OK, i figured it out. In the old OS, the text to speech was already set up with a hot key. The new os requires you to set it up yourself and this is how

Go to system preferences

Click on speech

Select "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" ans set key

you have to set your own key in order to make it work.... Ta Da

Now, once it is set, highlight and press the hot key you selected. 😉

Message was edited by: cck80

cck80

I'm glad you were able to get it to work. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. I can redefine this key to be pretty much anything, but no effect.

It's really a shame. It used to be a pretty fantastic feature.

I've been waiting for someone to post a solution!

Worked for me in 10.7.2 - - Thanks cck80 !!! - -

"Go to system preferences

Click on speech

Select "Speak selected text when the key is pressed" ans set key

you have to set your own key in order to make it work.... Ta Da

Now, once it is set, highlight and press the hot key you selected." 😉

by: cck80

My hotkey was set-up but didn't work. Redefining it solved the problem - Thanks!

I love Apple, from the time of my original Apple II. My Brother has an Apple I.

Please messing up both TTS and the Xcode development tools is very dissapointing. Don't pay dividends on your stock get more QA help. 😉

Love you Apple

Here is how to reproduce the issue. I can reproduce it in many other 3rd party products but gnuemacs is the one I use most.

I was using Snow Leopard then moved up to Lion 10.7.3. This same proceedure worked well on Snow Leopard. I need some type of work around.

1. On Mac OS X Lion go into system preferences.

2. Click on speach

3. Click on text to speech

4. Check Speak selected text when key is pressed

5. click on change key button and select the button you want to use. I

use <Alt-'>

6. Got to emacs and Highlight some text in a buffer

7. press the speech key combo for me <Alt-'>

8. The name of the buffer is spoken not the highlighted text.

Any and all assistance is greatly appreciated

::Charles

This workaround is a life saver. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!!!

Apple I add my voice. Please Fix This!

I just discovered that my text-to-speech feature wasn't working either. I'd upgraded to 10.7 on my 1st gen MacBook Air awhile ago, but hadn't needed to use the feature until today.

After reading this thread, I tried changing the voices and the key combination but the feature still didn't work. Then I found the process in the Activity Montior, quit it, and reset the key combination again. Tried it in the application Scrivener and Firefox - success.

This topic has been sort of hijacked by some folks having a DIFFERENT problem with Text To Speech.

The problem the original poster was having (which seems to have disappeared) is that text to speech wasn't working ANYWHERE including in System Preferences when you just tried to listen to the sample of the voice.

That is exactly the problem I'm having. I press "Play", the button changes to "Stop", but it never changes back to "Play" and the voice is never heard. Trying the "say" command in terminal has the same result. It never returns and never says anything.

I'm on OS X 10.7.3 and this started happening at some point during 10.7.3 (but not when it was first installed). I also had this problem temporarily on 10.7.2. As the original poster as now seen, the problem SEEMS to go away/come back at random. I'm sure there is an actual cause, but I have no idea what it could be. I have tried rebooting, clearing caches, disabling kernel extensions and disabling some software with no luck..

I'm running Lion 10.7.2 I believe, when I press play on the Speech->Text To Speech tab if I have my output in the Sound panel set to Internal Speakers/Headset and then press the Play Button on the TTS tab then I can hear the preview, it reads correctly.

However if I highlight text anywhere and use the key combo, I notice the blink of the cursor, I see the Speech Synthesizer Server in the processes, it does not hang, Though no sound comes fourth, no matter what the Output in Sound is set to.

Again however, if you select the text you want the TTS to process, and you instead use the Add To iTunes As Spoken Track Service, availabe under Service Preferences->Text it processes successfully no matter which installed voice you chose.

This to me seems like if you use the Key Combo some error happens where the text never makes it to the server, the server summoned with no text to process just sits there idle until you manually kill it, this is why the Play button freezes the preferrence window, it tries to launch another Speech Synthesizer Server, but it can't as I'm guessing that's a process set with a flag not allowing it 2 instances.

I posted all this in the hope that this may help my fellow users, and that Apple can get this issue pinned down and worked out, the last post to this thread was a MONTH AGO and it seems these people are sitting here waiting for any kind of official response even a glimmer of hope.

If anyone reading this has managed to fix it without posting how, PLEASE TELL US.

Try running Disk verify/repair. Sounds weird I know but that is what just fixed my issue. If verify doesn't tell you something is wrong then don't worry about the repair.

I had this same problem and I'm almost embarrassed to say that I didn't realize that the output was to an Airplay speaker....in my case, my AppleTV. When I was trying to use Text-to-Speech and having the issue, my TV/Audio was not on my AppleTV. I just happened to try and watch a show on Netflix as I tried again and lo and behold, I hear Tom reading my text on the TV! Is it possible that you have an Airplay speaker hooked up and aren't aware that your Text-to-Speech is transmitting?

In case anyone is still on Lion and struggling with this problem, I did find a workaround that resolved the issue for me. Open the Keyboard from System Preferences and select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Choose Application Shortcuts from the left and then add a new shortcut beneath the All Applications section. For Menu Title, type "Start Speaking" and then provide whatever hot-key combination you'd like. If you want a "Stop Speaking" option, you can create another shortcut for this using the same procedure. This solved this (very annoying) problem for me, so hopefully it might help someone else as well : )

How very clever!

@jean_h

Well that worked 🙂. I chose F12 and unchecked it for Dashboard elsewhere, as I never use Dashboard; and right-control F12 for Stop Speaking.

The other workarounds either didn't work at all, or were too much song-and-dance.

Apple should actually spend some of their 1/10 terabuck reserves fixing stuff, instead of lavishing it on their legal department's R&D labs.