Man, that Macintosh (OS 8 & 9) error voice is creepy!

[BillGates]

I just spoke with a customer who was running MacOS 8.5 or something similar and got an error that popped up. The creepy as hell error message voice started reading the error back. Tell me you wouldn't be freaked out having that thing doing it's devil speak to you in the middle of the night.

(This is not a Mac bashing, just a comment on the weird voice they choose to include with the OS)

 

[Electrode]

Pic... er, I mean recording?

 

[BillGates]

Heh, we should find a sound byte, but I don't know what I'd even search for. I bet a lot of people here might not even know what I'm talking about.

I can only imagine all of the little kids who had nightmares about the demon inside of their school's Macs.

 

[Antoneo]

Interesting you should say that, BillGates .

 

[tweakmm]

the irony

 

[Kenazo]

yes beyond the irony present in this thread I do agree with you. Back when I was running OS 9 I was once woken up in the middle of the night by the voice reading out an error message...scared the crap out of me....

 

[BillGates]

I don't understand why it was even included as a feature - the only reason it's really there is to scare blind people and children. I'm convinced!

 

[Kenazo]

well the feature is the text-speech system, it was kind of neat when it first came out but Apple hasn't touched it in years and years so it's pretty outdated now. You can select different voices also. I suppose you can turn off speech for error messages but I never did. For interest sake, RATM did a song solely voiced by the text-to-speech system...can't remember the name though

 

[Smolek]

anyone have a recording or the sound file ?

 

[BDawg]

Back in college, when the mac voices first came out, we would plug my computer up to the stereo and give it song text so it could kereoke.

 

[yakko]

I want to hear it.

 

[So]

Indeed, we need a Clip....<scampers off to google>

I think that I've heard that before, though I'm sure I've never been sitting in front of a Mac when it did that.

 

[Kadarin]

Heh.. I started wondering what they do for errors on OSX, but it's just occured to me that I haven't even seen an error since I've bought this thing. I believe you can disable that feature in the preferences, but I do agree that it's pretty creepy the first time you encounter it. Annoying, too.