Pages 'text to speech'

Question

Level 1

19 points

Pages 'text to speech'

After the latest update / upgrade to OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and subsequent ‘Pages’ upgrade, I noticed that in Pages (5.0) the speech feature has been modified. While it still works just as it did while in Safari, and Google i.e.: I can highlight text, right click the highlighted text and choose Speech then choose Start Speaking and stop the speech by clicking on Stop Speaking. The highlighted text is then “read” back to me, or stopped if I choose Stop Speaking. The “two key start / stop method also works in Safari.

With the latest upgrade / update, Pages and Preview no longer supports the option to highlighted text (right click / Speech / Start / Speaking or stop speaking. The two key “Start Speaking” has been disabled as well. Once the text is being read, (using Edit / speech / start speaking) the (Two key) method will cause the “STOP SPEAKING”

The Speech feature does work in Safari.

The Speech works in pages & preview only if accessed through Edit / Speech / Start Speaking.

In Pages, as well as PDFs in Preview the short key method does not work to START speech but it works to STOP speech and while the text is being read, the two key method will Stop Speech, but will not Start speech.

What I find missing in Pages & Previews (PDFs), is the ability to start and stop ‘Speech’ with the right click method and the two key method as well.

Is there patch (or something) I can download to fix this?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Nov 18, 2013 8:27 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Nov 18, 2013 10:00 AM in response to orionsm42

Yes this is annoying to say the least. If you foonote your document, in Pages, the speach stops at every numbered point. In MS Word, this is not the case. If anyone has a work around, apart from switching to MS Word, I am all ears?

Reply

Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,368 points

Nov 18, 2013 6:09 PM in response to orionsm42

I do not want to send a text passage off to iTunes or write it to an audio file on disk. Like you, I want to select and play back text from a service designed to do just that. Here is a solution. It can take selected text from any application and speak it.

See my recent post here in the Pages for Mac community. This discusses how to create an Automator service. Instead of the Apple Script code provided there, you want to copy and paste the code in this article. Once you save an Automator Service, you can open and modify it by re-launching Automator and choosing open recent.

Apple does not include any decent voices. You can (with discretion) download new (better) voices for free. I use discretion because each voice is a big download taking about a half-hour each on a fast pipe. Voices can be tuned with the Speaking Rate slider.

In System Preferences > Dictation & Speech, select Text to Speech. The System Voice selection has a custom voice setting at the bottom with multiple choices for various countries. The code below is set to what is already in OS X (Mountain Lion or Mavericks). From an English speaking perspective, Samantha, Allison, Tom, and Kate (UK) actually sound quite good without echo. Change the voice below to suit your country and auditory preference.

on run {input, parameters}
  
          set MySelectedText to input as text
       say MySelectedText using "Agnes"
  
          return input
end run

Reply