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Who is going to hack together a mac widget that allows us to select text anywhere, press a shortcut key and finally get a non robotic voice outputted in a reasonable amount of time?

I am aware of the Option + Esc shortcut on osx for the onboard TTS but wow is it hard to listen to in 2026.

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In System Settings, if you go to Accessibility and click "Read & Speak" in the "Vision" section, you can select a different voice using the "System voice" section. Click the "(i)" to preview your various options and even download more. Some, like "Allison (Enhanced)," sound leagues better than the default voice.

Great point! these are better than Samantha and they're free. But still, if I could wait a few seconds to get a much richer TTS experience I'd pay for that.

Easy to send one’s clipboard to Microsoft Azure and have their DragonHD voices read the text, say with Keyboard Maestro (or presumably Alfred, Raycast, etc.). Should work with selected text too.

You’d definitely get to pay for it, not what I consider cheap. (“$15 per 1M characters”) But IMO just about best-in-class (maybe ElevenLabs has a voice I’d like even better).

Have you tried /usr/bin/say ? Might already have something sufficient for you - there’s quite a few voices there.

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