Fun New Language Tools in iOS 6 and OS X

Photo: Cnet

Over on Sinosplice, John Pasden [1] points out the text-to-speech function in iOS 6, and notes that it can even read Chinese text even when your iPhone’s language is set to English [2].

To enable this function, you’ll need to go to:

settings > general > accessibility > vision > speak selection > on

From there, if you select a chunk of text on your screen, you can have it spoken to you by selecting the ‘speak’ pop-up option. I’ve not tested this, but I’m curious to see what other languages are supported.

Of course, this function is especially useful for language learners, either for checking to see how a word or character is pronounced. For me personally, I come across many characters in Japanese which I know from past Chinese study, but don’t know how to pronounce in Japanese. (I wonder which language iOS 6 will default to when given the same characters with no other context?)

Spoken and Translated Text on Mac OS X

However, as useful as the above tip is, I still spend far more time in OS X than I do on a mobile device. But thankfully there are text-to-speech functions for your Mac as well. If you look under system preferences > dictation & speech > text to speech, you’ll find that you can change the system voice from the default ‘Alex’ to an assortment of other languages, including:

• Chinese
  • China (Ting-Ting)
  • Taiwan (Ya-Ling)
  • Hong Kong (Sin-ji)
• Japanese (Kyoko)
• Korean (Narae and Yuna)
• Indonesian (Damayanti)
• Thai (Narisa)

After selecting some text to read on a webpage or in an app, you can right click and choose speech > start speaking (or just press option+esc). However, Apple warns that for best results, you should select a voice that speaks the system’s language. So it seems that if I want to use Japanese text-to-speech regularly, it would be better if I switch my system over to Japanese.

As for basic text translation options for Mac, you can always use the dictionary app, and ⌘+Crtl+D to trigger the floating dictionary. For me, I just need to make sure that my preferred dictionary is selected in the Dictionary application’s preferences.