I have been using Leopard for more than a week now…and I am discovering new things everyday…which is the same with any operating system really 
The “artificial voice” (think its called Alex) in Leopard sounds a lot better and is quite close to human voice (at most of the time), but you do laugh at times when it do sound like a robot 
Anyway, with the speech service, you can let your Mac read out documents / lecture notes / eBooks to you! Its great for lazy people like me 
Q. So, where is this Speech service?
A.
It’s fine to use it once or twice, but if you use it to read some PDFs and you have to go through the menu everytime…its a bit too much for me 
So I’ve decided to give it a keyboard shortcut key so we can save ourselves a bit of time Here is how we can do this:
Step 1. Open up System Preferences:
Step 2. Click on Keyboard & Mouse:
Step 3. Click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab:
Step 4. Now click on the “+“ sign at the bottom left hand corner to add a keyboard shortcut:
Step 5. Since the Speech service should work on anything that supports it, so we need to make sure we choose the All Application (so that it works everywhere):
Step 6. Now type in the two Menu Titles, one is Start Speaking Text, the other is Stop Speaking, just in case you get sick of the lecture notes
Step 7. Double check that you have got the keyboard shortcuts right:
—————————————————-
Now you are ready to go!
Try it out on some PDF files and let your Mac to read you a bed time story
Cool. XP also has the function similiar to speech service. I really want a Leopard. But I’m worry that I can not find the MAC versions of the softwares I frequently use.
Hi Quaikie, thanks for your comment
“…I’m worry that I can not find the MAC versions of the softwares I frequently use.”
thats is a really good point! I will do a post on the Mac software so you can see what sort of software I use to replace those that I use on Windows. But frankly speaking, there is no “one to one match”; some software are better on Macs…some are better under Windows
David,
I had been telling you to do the same thing what Quaikie wanted
- Listing equivalent Windows Softwares for Mac.
I think you need to wait for sometime as Leopard is lacking some application compatibility, but as you have leopard, you could test and put them here. Who knows, it will be helpful for me too in the near future
cool, looks like I have to do the post now
[...] printing option is really handy if you like the speech service in Leopard (there is a new voice in Leopard called Alex). If you are lazy like me, you can always [...]
You’re genius! I was looking for this solution for a long time.
Thank you!
[...] you can do with it, select a bunch of text and try out the ‘summarize‘ and ‘speech‘ tools. I’m a big Services fan. It’s probably one of the least used tools on Mac [...]
[...] 3. For those that want their apple to read something to them (or everything). [...]