Hey Fellow applevisers. I was wondering how to change the voices in voiceover utility. I have been learning my mac little by little, and I have been spending time in voiceover utility trying to download voices, but I have had trouble figuring out how to find the voice and download it. Your help would be appreciated. Thanks.
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How to download voices
In VoiceOver utility, you need to get to the Voices option like this:
1. Use VO+right until you hear "Utility Categories"
2. Use up/down arrows to move through them until you find Speech. (You can also type "sp" and it should select it)
3. Press VO+right and you should hear "Voices" which is the tab you want. It should be selected by default but press VO+Space if you're not sure.
4. Use VO+Right to move through the dialog.
This will list a primary voice and possibly additional voices.
You can either change your primary (ie default) voice or add some extra voices which will allow you to change them easily whenever you want.
So if you want to change the primary voice:
1. Use VO+left until you hear the name of your current primary voice, then hit vo+space.
2. It should now allow you to customize properties of the voice.
3. The first thing should be a button saying something like "Voice, Serena (Premium)" so press VO+space on that.
This is where you can choose the voice or download a new one. You can search for a voice or if you want to just browse:
1. Press VO+right to get to the table
2. If it doesn't automatically interact you may need to press VO+Shift+down on it.
3. Use VO+down to move through the table until you find a voice you like.
4. Press VO+Shift+down to enter the row
5. You can press VO+space to download the voice, or use VO+right to move right and then VO+Space to hear the sample.
6. Press VO+Shift+up a couple of times to get out of the table.
7. Press VO+Right to get to the Done button then press VO+Space to activate
8. You can review the options here to get the rate etc to your liking, then activate the DOne button to confirm.
If you want to use secondary voices, then instead of choosing the primary voice, keep going until you get to the "Add voice" button. You'll get the same voice list as before, so choose one and select Done.
Once you've added a secondary voice, you can use the Voice rotor thing to swap voices. It feels like an outrageous number of keys to press together but it's not that bad:
1. Press VO+Shift+Cmd with left or right arrows to bring up the voice rotor.
2. Now press left/right arrow until you find voice.
3. Press up/down until you find the one you want and press enter. Or press Esc if you change your mind.
I hope that helps a bit. You can also find some third party voices like Piper TTS and the like which you can download separately and they will appear in the voices list, but there are a good number of options just built into the Mac so I would definitely start there.