This is a quick little tip, to turn text into speech on OS X.
Open a Terminal and use the command say as follows:
say droptips rocks
Remember to have your speakers turned up and you’ll hear whatever you’ve typed after say.
Interestingly, if you type:
say x
It’ll Say “exx” or similar.
But if you do:
say os x
.. it’s clever enough to say “Oh Ess Ten” which is pretty impressive.
What use is there for this? Well.. you could use say in scripts to read out certain parts and to create alerts, I guess. You could also SSH to a remote Mac, and get it saying things like “Bring me a coffee”, but your mileage may vary on whether this works or not (getting the coffee from whoever was in the room at the time, that is!)
There are a few options, which are detailed within the manpage here: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/say.1.html