By • 6:00 am, April 3, 2015 • • Using these simple keyboard tricks will make your life so much better. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac Mastering a few crucial Mac keyboard shortcuts will make using your Apple computer easier and much more efficient. Cutting your reliance on your mouse will help you work more quickly, and you’ll undoubtedly impress your family, friends and co-workers to no end. You might even end up becoming the go-to Mac person in your office, and we all know how wonderful that will be. Here are the top 10 Mac keyboard shortcut tricks you really need to memorize right now, whether you’re a Mac newbie or a veteran user who still uses the mouse for everything out of habit.

I use Mac's Text to Speech function a lot. Under Settings > Speech > Text to Speech I also have set a 'Key' for quick access. Since I also want Text to Speech to read German and OS Lion offers Voices for other languages, I would like to have a second shortcut for German. Is there an Excel keyboard shortcut for 'Text to Columns' function for the Macbook? Update Cancel. What is the trick to use the shortcut 'Cmd + ' on a Mac with an AZERTY keyboard? How do I create keyboard shortcuts inside text area for example in a blog? What are keyboard shortcuts for refresh? What is the keyboard shortcut.

Advanced Click to set a preferred audio device as output for text-to-speech playback. It will be active only if there is at least one audio device installed. EXAMPLE: Text to Speech. Download the Shortcut 1.

MacOS also comes with more than 50 editing and formatting commands. So you can turn on Dictation and tell your Mac to bold a paragraph, delete a sentence, or replace a word.

Bring your text to life with Text to Speech! Text to speech produces natural sounding synthesised text from the words that you have entered in. With 82 different voices to choose from and the ability to adjust the rate and pitch, there are countless ways in which the synthesised voice can be adjusted. Full_absolution Excellent App This app has given me a voice again!

Click the self-named button to open the Speakable Items Folder from this pane. • Text to Speech: Here’s a fun pane. Click a voice from the System Voice pop-up menu, and Mac OS X uses that voice to speak to you from dialogs and applications. You can set the Speaking Rate (from Slow to Fast) and play a sample by clicking the Play button. (Try Zarvox, Bubbles, and Pipe Organ.) The Announce When Alerts are Displayed feature actually speaks the text within alert dialogs; to configure spoken alerts, click the Set Alert Options button. You can optionally add a phrase before the text, which you can choose from the Phrase pop-up menu. To add a phrase to the list, like Don’t Panic!, choose Edit Phrase List from the list.

Pros: – Great natural voice – Forward or rewind by paragraphs – Listen to webpages Cons: – Works only on Chrome Verdict: Suggesting Read Aloud is very straight forward; if you are someone who reads a lot on the internet and are looking for a free TTS software for that, nothing beats Read Aloud. Price: Free Link: 5. Capti Voice Capti Voice is probably the most polished and well rounded TTS software available for the Mac and the award are only there to justify that. Starting off, Capti Voice uses your browser for the app to function instead of a stand alone Mac application. Don’t worry, you can still use it while you are offline as it stores all its data locally and personally I have had no issues. Capti Voice has a subscription based model and even the free version has a lot to offer from various file format supports to text search while the premium versions add features like creating playlists, OCR Support and intelligent dictionary lookup. The voices offered across all the platforms are very high quality and commendable.

Please note that this feature will not work correctly in noisy environments since the noises will interfere with your spoken command. Another annoyance is that sometimes the machine can be so stupid that you have to repeat a command several times. But all in all, these speech recognition features of Mac OS X is another cool feature that Mac users should try. As a fun bonus, try to say this command to your Mac: “tell me a joke” and share your thoughts and experiences using Mac speech commands using the comments below. Explore more about:.

To do this, perform these steps: 1. Open the Text pane in the System Preferences > Keyboard. Select one of the substitutions, then select all by pressing Command + A. Drag and drop the text substitutions onto your Desktop. When you do this, you'll see a file created called 'Text Substitutions.plist.'

Just open the Speakable Items Folder (/User/Library/Speech/Speakable Items/) then rename the file(s). If you think that the “Minimize Speech Commands window” command is too long, just rename the corresponding file into something shorter, and then your Mac will understand the new command.