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milla88

My favorite command is 'say'. You can do all kinds of silly voices.

Try this out: say hello -v Good

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It knows how to sing "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" as well:

say -v cellos "Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum he he he ho ho ho fa lah lah lah lah lah lah fa lah full hoo hoo hoo"

OK, how did you discover that?

The "cellos" voice always sings that song, regardless of the words you ask it to speak. The syllables were chosen to fit the song.

Nice! You can do something like:

    python -c "print 'foo ' * 26" | say -v cellos

I used `say` to read out the cricket scores from a screenscraping bot whilst the TV (which was the radio at the time) was in use for games. Not quite TMS but it had a certain charm.

Whenever I had to run something that would take awhile, I would append '; say "YOUR THING IS DONE"' to the end so I'd be aware of when it finished.

Just mucking around, came up with this:

    wc -l < /usr/share/dict/words | xargs -I {} jot -r {} 100000  | paste -d " " - /usr/share/dict/words | sort | awk '{print $2 "! "}' | say

If you install coreutils (`brew install coreutils`), you can cut that down a bit:

    gshuf /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 10 | awk '{print $1 "! "}' | say

For anyone wondering, you can also do this:

say -v '?' (This gives you a list of voices)

say -v Good (This let's you type in a stream of text)

A newer trick (as of Mavericks) is that say can also highlight words while reading text:

   say --interactive=/green spending each day the color of the leaves

In Mavericks, selecting Customize from the System Voice dropdown of the Dictation & Speech preferences brings up a list of voices you can download as well. I think Alex was my default, but some of the others seem much better.

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