Is it possible to change the speech rate in OS X say command?

Question

say -v Alex "Hello"

Is there a way to change the speed of speech like there is in the speech settings of System Preferences -> Date & Time -> Clock -> Customize Voice?

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score 23 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 19 '19 at 02:02

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Yes, there is. The command

say -v Alex "Hello" -r 200

will cause the voice Alex say "Hello" at a rate of 200 words/minute.

edited Jun 19 '19 at 02:02

Giacomo1968

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answered Nov 22 '13 at 01:04

Victor Wilson

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Also, I'd like to point out (with no rudeness intended) that this is easily found in the manpage for `say`. `man [programname]` will bring up the documentation for most unix command line applications. – Victor Wilson Nov 22 '13 at 01:21
`-r --rate=` wasn't working for me on 10.13 for `/usr/bin/say`, but the embedded speech command below did. Was using `-v Tom`. – Pysis May 13 '18 at 14:22
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What is the default rate? – Felix Jassler May 28 '20 at 10:44
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@FelixJassler The default rate is 200 – John Mark Mitchell Feb 11 '21 at 23:48

score 10 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 22 '13 at 11:18

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There is also an embedded speech command for changing the rate:

say '[[rate 200]] hello'

answered Nov 22 '13 at 11:18

Lri

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Unfortunately, most of the new voices added by Apple since 10.6 will ignore embedded commands for speech rates and phoneme preferences. :( Really annoying, since I love the Fiona voice pack, but she occasionally mis-pronounces some words so horribly that they're unrecognisable. :( – Benjamin Nolan Mar 31 '14 at 22:30
Interestingly, this works in HTML documents with Apple Speech Synthesis hotkey and the JS Speech Synthesis API. – joeyhoer Nov 20 '17 at 21:34
Seems to work as of 10.12, even with the very realistic voices like Thomas. Super creepy at 40 wpm :D – iwasrobbed Apr 26 '18 at 02:24
doesn't seem work (nor does `--rate` with localized voices such as Luca and Alice) on 10.14 – riffraff Jul 26 '19 at 08:14
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It's okay with me to use `say "[[rate +500]] hello"` ;) As the document says. – wind2412 Sep 15 '19 at 02:54
I'm on 11.5 and the + added by @wind2412 is the only thing that worked for me – catgofire Jun 18 '22 at 00:25
Interesting thing to note is that this method only changes the speed in increments of 50 wpm, unlike the `--rate` flag – Eric Xue Jun 19 '23 at 01:27

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 15 '21 at 23:19

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FWIW: I'm on Big Sur and the -r/--rate is simply ignored. However, the embedded command as described by @lri still works.

P.S. I see in an earlier comment that 10.13 also had that issue. Well...

answered Jan 15 '21 at 23:19

qwerty_so

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Is it possible to change the speech rate in OS X say command?

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