Text to Speech on a Mac: Shortcut, Voices and Apps

Written by Pratik Nayak, the developer of Readlet. This guide covers the free options built into macOS as well as our app. Updated November 6, 2026.

Built in: Speak selection

Turn it on in System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content (Read & Speak on the newest macOS). Then select text in almost any app and press Option-Esc. You can choose a system voice, set the speaking rate, highlight words as they are spoken and show an on-screen controller.

Many apps also have Edit > Speech > Start Speaking, with no setup.

Apple's guide to having your Mac speak text ↗

Built in: the say command

Terminal includes say. It is handy for scripts, or for turning a text file into audio.

say "Your build has finished"
say -f notes.txt -o notes.aiff

Run man say to see its voices and options.

Readlet: a local neural voice

Readlet reads text aloud with a natural neural voice that runs on your Mac. It is designed for listening to articles, documents and long passages rather than single sentences.

• Choose what to read: drag over text on screen, press Control–Option–R for selected text, or open a text file, RTF, DOCX, searchable PDF or image.
• Pick a voice: Heart, Bella, Emma or Adam. Apple system voices remain available too.
• Stay in control: a small player shows progress, with pause, speed and stop.
• Keep it local: after a one-time voice download of about 392 MB, speech and text recognition run on your Mac. No account, no subscription, and your text is not uploaded.

Control–Option–R is intended for selected-text reading, but app compatibility still needs broader testing. Readlet requires an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 26 or newer, and its voice is English.

Side by side

How to have a PDF read aloud on a Mac ↗