Add the Voice of Siri to Mac OSX (And How To Make Room for Her)

[MotionMan]

A couple things I did not know (especially that the voices I am not currently using are taking up 500mb on my drive):

http://osxdaily.com/2012/06/04/add-voice-of-siri-to-mac-os-x/

If you bought a new Mac with OS X Lion (or later) pre-installed you probably already have the voice of Siri enabled by default. Siri is actually called “Samantha”, but if you upgraded to OS X Lion manually from Snow Leopard you may have missed the addition of Siri’s voice completely, so here’s how to add it to a Mac.

Launch System Preferences from the  Apple menu and click on “Speech”
Click the “Text to Speech” tab and then click the pulldown menu next to “System Voice”
Choose “Customize” from the dropdown menu
Check the box next to “Samantha”, a notification will be added to the window saying the voice will be automatically downloaded, click “OK” to start the voice download
Confirm at the next screen to install the Samantha voice by clicking “Install”
When finished, verify that the voice is selected to use it as your default text to speech voice in Mac OS X, click “Play” to hear the voice sample
With the voice active you can now use any of Mac OS X’s text to speech abilities to hear Siri talk to you.

There are tons of other voices to add as well, but keep in mind that each voice is fairly large weighing in around 500MB each. If you want to be conservative with hard disk space it’s possible to delete voices you aren’t using, though it’s always a good idea to keep at least one installed at all times.

The pre-installed voices take up 500mb total. The ones you can add, like Siri/Samantha (407mb), are much larger.


http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/29/delete-voices-mac-os-x-lion/

One of OS X Lion‘s many great new features are all the new high quality multi-lingual voices (here is how to add them yourself). If you went on a voice adding spree like I did, you may quickly realize that all these new voices take up a fair amount of disk space, each weighing in around 400 MB. On a large enough hard drive that isn’t too big of a deal, but I’m on a MacBook Air with 64 GB so 10 voices taking up 4.3 GB of space matters to me.

Delete Downloaded Voices from OS X 10.7 Lion
Using Finders great “Go to Folder” feature of Command+Shift+G enter the following path:

/System/Library/Speech/Voices/

You’ll see a list of voices, but notice they come in two formats: Voice and VoiceCompact, you can keep VoiceCompact because those are just the short samples, it’s the Voice.SpeechVoice you want to delete to remove the full voice.

For a quick example we’ll get rid of Samantha – sorry Samantha, you sound lovely but you take up too much space – so we will be deleting Samantha.SpeechVoice. Select that folder and either drag it to the Trash or hit Command+Delete to place it there automatically. Because the voice files are contained in /System/ you will need to authenticate with the administrator password in order to delete the file, so type that in, then you can empty the Trash. No more Samantha!

I hope you find these useful.

MotionMan