Fun with words

If you’ve got a mac, you can make your terminal speak to you. You can even make it speak text files to you. And send the words into an audio file for safe keeping. It all comes courtesy of the ‘say’ command.

say “I am the terminal, I hate you.”
say -o filename.aiff “I am the terminal, I hate you”
say -o filename.aiff -f tobespoken.txt

The first one will make it say something, the second one will output it to an .aiff file and the last one will speak the textfile into the .aiff file. There’s a -v switch to change the voice, you can also just make it speak text files. It could be useful in conjunction with an iPod. You can even convert your .aiff files to .mp3 (or acc) by using the advanced menu in iTunes (example).