The feature is now called Spoken Content, and it comes with more controls than previous iterations, as well as a number of ways to customize your experience with it.
Read on to learn everything Spoken Content has to offer, and why you might prefer to use it over the Speech option in some Apple applications.
What Is Spoken Content on a Mac?
Spoken Content is an Accessibility feature that exists on your Mac (with a similar speech feature on iOS devices as well). It allows your Mac to read aloud text in word processing programs, websites, PDFs, and even ebooks in different ebook readers.
Some Mac apps, like Pages and Safari, allow text to be read aloud with the macOS Speech function, available in the Edit menu in those apps. But Speech isn’t available everywhere, while Spoken Content can be activated via a keyboard shortcut basically anywhere.
Speech can start speaking and stop speaking, but that’s about it. Spoken Content gives you a lot more control.
In addition to starting and stopping its reading, you can pause Spoken Content and have it pick up where it last left off. Speech will always restart at the beginning of a text or highlighted section if you stop and start it.
You can also change the reading speed of Spoken Content whenever you want, and select which voice you’d like it to read aloud to you with. Spoken Content can also highlight words as you go, so you can follow along in the text during the reading.
All of this makes Spoken Content a little closer to third-party document readers, but it’s free and already on your Mac!
It’s not a completely perfect feature, of course. Spoken Content’s voice options are all pretty robotic, and the feature can mispronounce words, names, and content like Roman numerals.
You might therefore find the reading experience clunky or hard to listen to for extended periods of time. But you might also get used to it quickly and get a lot of enjoyment from this free text-reading feature.
How to Set Up Spoken Content
To start using Spoken Content, you need to have it turned on. To turn it on, head to System Preferences > Accessibility, and select Spoken Content from the side menu.
Check the box next to Speak selection. Once that’s done, Spoken Content will be available to use!
There are more elements to set up in the Spoken Content menu under Accessibility’s System Preferences before you start to use the feature.
One element is System Voice, which is the voice Spoken Content will read aloud with. Select any option from the System Voice dropdown menu and hit the Play button beside it to hear a sample of a voice and decide if you like the way it sounds.
Once you’ve selected a voice, decide on the Speaking Rate (the speed at which text is read aloud to you once Spoken Content is activated). This can be altered as Spoken Content reads, but if you prefer a fast reading speed, you can make that the default.
Move the marker along the Speaking Rate slider to set the default read aloud speed for Spoken Content. Clicking Play will let you hear a sample of this speed as you make your decision.
As we mentioned in the previous section, Spoken Content is activated with a keyboard shortcut. This keyboard shortcut usually defaults to Option + Esc, but you can set the shortcut to whatever you want to simplify using it or remembering the shortcut more easily.
By clicking the Options button beside Speak selection you can also select what, if anything, gets highlighted as Spoken Content reads. You can also select the color of the highlight, any styling on the sentences being read out, and whether you can see the Spoken Content controller as you use it.
We’d encourage having Show controller set to Automatically or Always, so you can use all of Spoken Content’s controls as it reads.
Always lets the controller stay on screen once you’ve used the keyboard shortcut once, so you can reactivate it without needing to use the shortcut again. Automatically will let the controller disappear once you hit the Stop button on it.
Letting Spoken Content highlight text as it reads is really useful when reading out longer texts, as it lets you see where you are in a file and helps you navigate to where you want to start reading from later. We’ll go over navigating texts and using Spoken Content in the next section.
Using Your Mac’s Spoken Content Feature
It’s pretty easy to use Spoken Content once you have it set up. First, you need some text you want to have read aloud. Then you need to navigate in the text to where you want Spoken Content to start reading.
Navigate the text by clicking to the left of the first word you want to have read aloud or by putting your text cursor before the word, if you’re reading an editable text. Spoken Content will always start with the closest word you clicked near or had your cursor beside.
You can also highlight part of a text to have Spoken Content read just that part out, and not have it read anything before or after.
To make Spoken Content start reading, hit Option + Esc, or whatever keyboard shortcut you set for the feature. The reading will begin, and Spoken Content’s controller will appear.
The controller will show the name of the application it’s reading from, along with a few buttons. The buttons do the following:
Turtle: Slow down Spoken Content’s reading pace. Rewind: Go back to the start of a sentence and read from there. Play/Pause: Start or pause Spoken Content’s reading. Hitting Play after pausing will restart the reading where you left off, no matter where you’ve clicked since. Stop: Stop Spoken Content’s reading entirely. This lets you navigate to a new place in the text to start reading again, and will close the controller if you don’t have Show controller in Spoken Content’s preferences set to Always. Fast-Forward: Skip ahead to the next sentence and read from there. Rabbit: Speed up Spoken Content’s reading pace.
The controller also has an X button to close it, which will stop Spoken Content from working until you type its keyboard shortcut again.
Use the controller buttons to manipulate how and when Spoken Content reads out loud to you. Spoken Content will keep reading until you hit the pause or stop buttons, or until it runs out of text in a file to read.
This means you can open other applications, or do other work while listening to Spoken Content. This is great for taking notes on texts, and for multitasking while using your Mac.
But you can also just sit and listen to text with Spoken Content. It’s a feature you can use according to your own needs and desires!
Start Listening to Text With Mac’s Spoken Content Feature
Spoken Content is a great tool for listening to text on your Mac instead of reading it. Whether you always have trouble reading documents on a computer or like how Spoken Content gives you the ability to multitask while you read, it’s a feature you can start using very easily.
We hope the above guide helps you get started using Spoken Content. It’s very handy in a large variety of situations, and even with a robotic voice it could seriously change how you work on your Mac.
