Michel Coornaert
Strasbourg, France

VoiceOver 10.7

Downloading Apple High-Quality Multilingual Voices for VoiceOver with Mac OS 10.7 Lion


High-quality multilingual voices for VoiceOver on Mac OS 10.7 Lion may be downloaded for free from Apple. Each voice corresponds to a male or female first name. The English dialects voices include Samantha (American English), Jill (American English), Karen (Australian English), Lee (Australian English), Daniel (British English), Emily (British English), Serena (British English), Sangeeta (Indian English), Moira (Irish English), Fiona (Scottish English), and Tessa (South-African English). Additional languages include Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain), French (France), French (Canada), German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Mainland China), Mandarin (Taiwan), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish (Belgium), Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. There are two qualities for certain voices: premium (high-quality) and compact (low-quality). The space required on your computer for each high-quality voice is about 350 to 500MB. In order to download Apple voices, you must be connected to Internet. The time for downloading a voice depends on your connection.

  • To download a new voice:
    Press Ctrl + Opt + F8 (on Macbook Fn + Ctrl + Opt + F8) to open VoiceOver Utility, then
    Go to the Menu bar by pressing Ctrl + Opt + m, then
    Go to "View" with the Right Arrow, then
    Go to "Speech" with the Down Arrow, then
    Press Ctrl + Opt + Spacebar, then
    Go to the List of Voice pop-up menu by pressing a few times Ctrl + Opt + Right Arrow or Ctrl + Opt + Left Arrow, then
    Select "Customize…" by moving with the Down Arrow, then
    Press Ctrl + Opt + Spacebar, then
    Press a few times Ctrl + Opt + Right Arrow to go to the voice table, then
    Select the voice you want to download by moving with the Down and Up Arrows, then
    If you want to hear how the voice sounds like, press Ctrl + Opt + Right Arrow to go to the "Play" button and press Ctrl + Opt + Spacebar to click the button or
    If you want to download the voice interact with it by pressing Ctrl + Opt + Shift + Down Arrow twice, then press Ctrl + Opt + Spacebar to check the checkbox, then press Ctrl + Opt + Shift + Up Arrow twice to stop interacting, then press the Return key (a License Agreement dialog box will open), then press again the Return key to accept the license conditions.

  • To quickly change speech settings (rate, pitch, volume, intonation, voice):
    Press Ctrl + Opt + Cmd + Right arrow to open the Speech rotor, then
    Select settings by using Ctrl + Opt + Cmd + Up and Down arrows.
    This command may be used to change voice very quickly.

  • VoiceOver Commands



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    • Last Update: November 9, 2013