I really like the say command on my Mac’s. Great fun letting another mac in your building say something while someone else is using it.

I stumbled upon some nice tricks regarding the say command.

Examples:

ie you could play a simple melody like that:

say -v Good oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Where “-v Good” defines the voice. You could use “-v Bad” too, or any other system voice. if you dont define a voice yourself, say will use the default voice defined in System Preferences

Check the apple link at the end of this post for more details on the say command.

You could try something more creative like that:

osascript -e ’say “Dum dum dee dum dum dum dum dee Dum dum dee dum dum dum dum dee dum dee dum dum dum de dum dum dum dee dum dee dum dum dee dummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm” using “Pipe Organ”‘

Best snippet i found so far:

osascript -e ’say “oh This is a silly song silly song silly song this is the silliest song ive ever ever heard So why keep you listening listening listening while you are supposed to work to work to work to work its because i hate my job hate my job hate my job its because i hate my job more than anything else No its because youve no life youve no life youve no life and you better go get one after forwarding this crap” using “cellos”‘

Great =)

Links:

• UsingMac.com – Terminal Sing songs (source)
• Apple Say Manual

Tags: built-in voice, cli, developer.apple, osascript, say, speech, system preferences, terminal, text to speech