[macvoiceover] How To: speed up Voiceover beyond 100

  • From: Jacob Schmude <j.schmude@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:10:38 -0500

Hi Everyone
Here is a hack to enable Voiceover to speak much faster than normal that I've just discovered. I saw the messages wondering about this, so decided to do a bit of manual Plist editing to see if I could make it speed up. Open the Library/Preferences folder, and locate the com.apple.voiceover.plist file. Pressing command+o on this should open it in the plist editor, though if you'd prefer to edit the XML manually feel free to do so. I will describe how to use Plist editor here, if you're manually editing the XML you can skip most of the navigation steps and just find the value you need.
We are looking for the SCRVoiceRate preference field. In PList editor:
Navigate as follows, expanding the categories when necessary:
Root, SCRCategories, SCRCategorySystemWide, ScrSpeechComponentSettings.
Once you open the SCRSpeechComponentSettings category, you should see the SCRVoiceRate item. Once highlighted on it, tab to the edit field where the value is placed, and you can then change it beyond the limits of what the VoiceOver utility allows. This is the Rate in Voiceover divided by 100. So a rate of 100 in Voiceover is represented by the number 1 in this field. To get 200, therefore, you would place the value of 2 here. To get 250, 2.5 and so on. Note: This setting will last until you change Voiceover's speech rate in the VO utility, at which point you will have to edit this file again if you wish to boost your rate beyond 100. Also, keep in mind that the rate is relative to the voice, and if you go beyond the limits of what that voice can support you may have odd issues. I haven't exhaustively tested Alex's maximum speed, but I can safely get to 200 so far, and he actually sounds very nice at super speeds. Personally, I think Apple should allow us to go to whatever speed we wish, both in Voiceover and in System prefs which has an even slower limit than VO does. But until then, at least there is a way to speed up Voiceover. Oh and, naturally, this is unsupported and you do this at your own risk, etc etc...
hth




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