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Speak the time on the hour via Terminal
Authored by: Reaperducer on Jan 02, '08 08:30:20AM

What I've always wanted is a way to make the hourly time announcement in a foreign language (French, for example). It would be very useful for people learning a new language to hear the numbers on a regular basis.

I've tried changing my Mac's system language to French, but it still speaks the time in English.



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Speak the time on the hour via Terminal
Authored by: fguilleme on Jan 02, '08 12:26:50PM

I had the same problem with the french voice. I use OSX in english with a qwerty keyboard but I like to hear the time in french using the proper form (5 heure moins le quart in place of the ugly 16 heure 45). So the only option was to use a simple shell script and cron. Associated with a nice voice such as those from assistiveware it makes a nice speaking clock.
Additoonnaly the voices can be used with adium to speak the various events instead of a stupid sound. It can even speak the message in case you're not in front of the screen.



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Speak the time on the hour in French
Authored by: rickybuchanan on Jan 03, '08 01:21:08AM
A script like this would allow you to do that, as the say command has a -v voicename switch to specify which voice. So if you put whatever French text you want instead of the English text and specify the correct voice with the command, it will say the numbers in French automatically.

You'll need a French voice to do this with, such as the ones AssistiveWare sell - you can't get the default Apple voices to speak languages other than English.

Assuming your French voice was Alice the command would be (excuse my French) something like this:
say -v Alice Le temps est maintenant `date +%I` heures.
I think.

I don't actually use non-English voices - I just use both the American and British ones which is probably a little different - so if this doesn't work I suggest you consult Tom at The Multilingual Mac blog about it. It's definititely do-able though.

Ricky
ATMac - http://atmac.org/ - Assistive Technology for Mac OS X Users

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[Please excuse mistakes/brevity, typed via on-screen keyboard due to disability]

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