You may have noticed a menu item in many of your applications called Services. This is OSX’s way of letting you know how you can make applications interact with each other. One feature of Services that I find both interesting and useful in Safari is the Speech option.
START READING
I often find myself reading news articles from multiple news sources online that are covering the same article. I like to see how they’re different and see if one media source is applying any additional information that another may be missing. Safari and Mac OSX Speech option is perfect to allow me to essentially read two articles at once. Safari reads out loud the first article while I continue on to the next one.To get Safari to start reading for you:
- Find a website you’d like Safari to read back to you
- Select the text you’d like to read
- Click Safari on the menu bar
- Highlight Services, Speech, and then click “Start Speaking Text”
Thats all it takes and your mac will quickly start reading back to you the contents of the website. This is a great way to get multiple things done at once. I personally enjoy having Safari read back recipes to me while I’m cooking, or reading back blog articles on my google reader page. How would you use this feature? Don’t forget, you can create a keyboard shortcut to Start Speaking Text with just a few clicks on the keyboard.
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October 6, 2008
[...] Let Safari do the reading for you - If you often find yourself trying to do to much at once this feature is perfect for you. I often have Safari read back to me cooking recipes or some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to while I accomplish other tasks. Just be sure you can get use to the computer voice on your Mac. [...]