Text-To-Speech Mac Max8

Adam Alcock's icon

Hi,
Im trying to get a basic text-to-speech programme working that reads from message boxes in MAX 8. Any of you guys know any guides or good sources on here to get this to work on Mac.?
I've been seeing that [shell] object around but cant seem to find any sources that are up to date and a lot have dead links.

It will be part of a sound-art installation based on mass surveillance, that will read tweets in real time by a chosen key word. I have the rest of the installation working I think this would just add ad extra layer that would be effective rather than just projecting the tweets.

Many thanks
-A

Adam Alcock's icon

Basically Ive got the patch with the shell help file open and don't know where to go from here. I'm not the greatest coder but can usually get stuff to work wit some guidance

adamjohnwilliams's icon

You can just send "say" messages to the shell. It will use the default dictation voice & settings of your Mac unless you add arguments to the shell command. Type 'man say' in your Terminal to see what these options are.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Good luck with the installation - sounds great!

Adam Alcock's icon

Thanks so much for replying. I ended up using the aka.speech object. For some reason i had to go back to max7 for these objects to work and it would have saved me a lot of hair pulling. Simple as that.

Thanks again!