Voice Control

Your Mac's text-to-speech engine allows for sophisticated control of speech, Apple just don't do a good job of letting you know about it. The following commands can be inserted into your document to control how it is spoken. Note that formatting is important so make sure you follow the examples given below. You will want to play with the values to determine what works best for you; the ability to test your document comes in handy here.

Apple does provide detailed instructions on how to get the speech engine to process your text phonemically.

Rate Control
The following commands lets you speed up and slow down the rate at which the text is spoken (respectively):
[[ rate +50 ]]
[[ rate -50 ]]

Volume Control
The following commands lets you increase and decrease the volume at which the text is spoken (respectively):
[[ volm +0.3 ]]
[[ volm -0.3 ]]

Emphasis
The following commands lets you emphasize and de-emphasize text (respectively):
[[ emph + ]]
[[ emph - ]]

Pauses
The following command lets insert a pause into your text (the value is in milliseconds so the example gives you about a half second pause):
[[ slnc 500 ]]

Reset
The following command lets you return all settings back to their defaults (as defined within the Speech Preferences):
[[ rset ]]

Visit Cepstral if you'd like to find better/alternative voices.