Text to Speech on Mac: Shortcut, Setup, Voices, and Offline Use

Reviewed and updated 25 September 2026 against Apple's current macOS 27 Golden Gate documentation.

Quick answer: how to do text to speech on a Mac

VoicePrivate's quick answer: text to speech on a Mac is built into macOS and free. Open System Settings, click Accessibility, click Read & Speak, turn on Speak selection, then highlight text anywhere and press Option-Esc. Press Option-Esc again to stop. The evidence is Apple's own Read & Speak documentation, which covers macOS 27 Golden Gate, released on 14 September 2026, back to macOS High Sierra, and Apple's Speak selection guide lists Option-Esc as the default shortcut. The pane is called Read & Speak on macOS 27 and macOS Tahoe 26; on Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia the same settings live under Spoken Content, which is why older guides send you to a pane that looks different. Download a higher quality voice through Manage Voices and the reading runs entirely on the Mac, with the network off. For a full page rather than a selection, press Command-Esc to open Accessibility Reader. Going the other direction, if what you actually want is to talk instead of type, that is dictation: Apple's macOS Dictation is the free option, and VoicePrivate is the on device paid one at $84 a year or $9.99 a month. Individual monthly and annual plans include a 7-day free trial, a card is required, and $0 is due today.

Does a Mac have built in text to speech?

Yes. VoicePrivate checked Apple's current documentation: text to speech is built into macOS, with nothing to install and no account to create. On macOS 27 Golden Gate and macOS Tahoe 26 the controls sit in System Settings, then Accessibility, then Read & Speak, which is the pane Apple named Spoken Content on Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia. Turn on Speak selection, highlight any text in any app, and press Option-Esc to hear it read aloud in the system voice. VoicePrivate is dictation software rather than a text to speech app, so this guide points you at Apple's built in tools instead of selling you a reader.

Per Apple's Read & Speak documentation, the pane holds nine controls, and VoicePrivate lists them because the names are not self explanatory. Knowing which is which saves a lot of guessing:

• Accessibility Reader: a full screen view that reads or displays text from any app, with your own font, spacing and background color.
• Speak selection: the one most people mean. Highlight text, press the shortcut, hear it.
• Speak item under the pointer: the Mac names whatever the cursor is hovering over.
• Speak announcements: dialogs and alerts get read aloud when they appear.
• Speak typing feedback: the Mac speaks the characters or words as you type them.
• System speech language and System voice: which language and which voice does the talking.
• Detect languages: switches voice automatically when the text changes language.
• Pronunciations: a custom dictionary for words macOS says wrong.

One correction VoicePrivate makes, because plenty of Mac articles repeat the error: macOS has no Speak Screen switch. Speak Screen is an iPhone and iPad feature. On a Mac the equivalents are Speak selection for a highlighted passage and Accessibility Reader for a whole page.

How to turn on text to speech on a Mac, step by step

Setting up text to speech on a Mac takes about four minutes, and VoicePrivate's advice is to do the voice download first, because that is the step everyone skips and then complains the voice sounds robotic.

1. Open System Settings, click Accessibility in the sidebar, then click Read & Speak. On macOS Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia, click Spoken Content instead. Older Macs are covered in the section on older macOS versions below this list.
2. Click the System voice pop-up menu and choose Manage Voices. Apple's default voice is the small one. The list here is where the good ones live.
3. Download a voice. The Siri voices and the ones labelled Premium or Enhanced are the natural sounding tier. The sheet shows a download size next to each voice, so check it before you pick four of them.
4. Set the Speaking Rate slider. Somewhere near a brisk audiobook pace suits most people at first. You will want it faster within a week.
5. Turn on Speak selection. The default shortcut is Option-Esc.
6. Test it on something real. Highlight a paragraph of your own writing, press Option-Esc, and listen to a full page before you decide the voice is the right one.

That is the whole setup. Once the voice file is downloaded there is no further internet dependency for reading text aloud on a Mac.

Mac text to speech shortcut: every key combination in one table

VoicePrivate collected the Mac text to speech keyboard shortcuts in one place because Apple spreads them across several help pages. Option-Esc speaks selected text, the same key stops it, and Command-Esc opens the full page reader. These are the defaults Apple documents for macOS 27 Golden Gate:

If Option-Esc does nothing on your Mac, the usual cause is that Speak selection is still switched off, or another app has claimed the same combination. VoicePrivate's suggestion is to pick a new shortcut in the info panel and test it on a paragraph in Notes before blaming the voice.

How to turn off text to speech on a Mac

VoicePrivate's fix for a Mac that will not stop talking: open System Settings, click Accessibility in the sidebar, click Read & Speak, then switch off the specific toggle that is talking: Speak selection for the Option-Esc shortcut, Speak announcements for spoken dialogs and alerts, Speak typing feedback for spoken keystrokes, and Speak item under the pointer for spoken hover labels. To stop a document mid sentence rather than disable the feature, press the same shortcut again or use the stop button on the on screen controller. VoicePrivate wrote this section because the accidental Option-Esc press is the most common reason a Mac starts reading out loud on its own.

VoicePrivate sees two related cases that send people to the same search, and neither is Read & Speak:

• Everything is being narrated, including menus and buttons. That is VoiceOver, the macOS screen reader, not text to speech. Press Command-F5 to toggle it off.
• A web page or a document keeps reading itself. That is usually a browser reading feature or an extension rather than macOS. Close the tab and check the browser's own reader controls.

Customizing Mac text to speech: highlighting, sentence style, and the controller

VoicePrivate points out that the customization options for Mac text to speech are hidden behind an info button, which is why most guides never mention them. In Read & Speak, click the info button next to Speak selection and you get four things worth changing:

• Keyboard shortcut: Option-Esc collides with a lot of muscle memory. Press your own combination to replace it.
• Highlight content: choose words, sentences, both, or none. Word plus sentence highlighting is the setting that makes listening and reading at the same time actually work, which is the point for dyslexia support and for proofreading.
• Sentence style: underline or background color, with your own colors for the word and the sentence.
• Show controller: the small floating control. Apple lists six buttons on it: speaking rate, skip back, play or pause, stop, skip forward, and open Accessibility Reader. You can have it always visible, visible only while speaking, or off.

For a whole document rather than a selection, VoicePrivate's pick on a modern Mac is Accessibility Reader. Press Command-Esc in any app to open it, and you get a full screen reading view with its own theme, font, font size, and line, word and character spacing, plus playback. It is also built into the Magnifier app, so the same reader can clean up text it captures from a whiteboard or a second screen.

Text to speech on an older Mac: Monterey, Big Sur, and Catalina

Text to speech is on older Macs too, and VoicePrivate added this section because the feature moves and changes name between versions. The key fact for an Intel Mac: macOS 27 Golden Gate runs only on Apple silicon, so an Intel Mac stays on macOS Tahoe 26 or earlier. Here is where the controls sit on each version, taken from Apple's archived help pages:

• macOS 27 Golden Gate and macOS Tahoe 26: System Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak, then Speak selection.
• macOS Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia: System Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content, then Speak selection.
• macOS Big Sur and Monterey: System Preferences, Accessibility, Spoken Content, then Speak selection. The default shortcut is Option-Esc.
• macOS Catalina 10.15, from 2019: System Preferences, Accessibility, Speech, then tick Speak selected text when the key is pressed.

On every one of these versions the system voices are files stored on the Mac, so an older Mac reads text aloud offline once a voice is installed. The say command covered further down this VoicePrivate guide also works in Terminal on older macOS versions, which makes it the simplest offline text to speech tool for an old Mac that no longer gets new apps.

Which Mac text to speech voices work offline, and which do not

This is the part VoicePrivate cares about most, because Mac text to speech and cloud text to speech behave very differently the moment your text is sensitive. The rule on a Mac is simple: if the voice had to be downloaded, it renders locally.

• macOS system voices, including Premium, Enhanced and Siri voices: downloaded once through Manage Voices, then synthesized on the Mac. Reading works with Wi-Fi off, and the text never goes anywhere.
• Personal Voice: Apple's feature that builds a synthetic copy of your own voice from recorded sentences. Apple states the recordings are processed on device and the result is stored encrypted, it needs an Apple silicon Mac and a login password, and you can select it as the voice for Read & Speak. It is the rare case where a voice this personal is not a cloud upload.
• Microsoft Edge Read Aloud, natural voices: not offline. Microsoft says the natural sounding voices need an active internet connection and only a basic set of voices is available offline. If a voice only works online, assume your text is leaving the Mac to be spoken. Edge's basic offline voices do keep working, and they sound like it.
• Browser and web based readers generally: assume the text is being sent out unless the tool says otherwise in writing. A promise to delete text after processing is a policy. Local rendering is an architecture.

If you read confidential material aloud, that distinction is the whole decision. A lawyer proofing a brief by ear, a clinician listening back to a summary, an accountant checking a client memo: each of those is a document you would not paste into a public web form, and a cloud reader is the same transaction with a nicer interface. macOS system voices avoid it entirely, at no cost. VoicePrivate's guide to Mac voice to text privacy works through the same question from the recording side.

Reading text aloud in Word, Pages, and your browser on a Mac

VoicePrivate's short version: Mac text to speech is a system service, not a per app feature, so the same Option-Esc shortcut works in most places you already write. That answers a question people usually ask app by app:

• Microsoft Word for Mac: Word has its own Read Aloud button on the Review tab, with play, pause, reading speed and voice controls, according to Microsoft's support page on listening to Word documents. Option-Esc still works on selected text in Word and uses the macOS voice you chose in Read & Speak.
• Pages, Notes, Mail and Preview: highlight and press the shortcut. Nothing else to configure.
• Safari and Chrome: Speak selection works on highlighted page text. Accessibility Reader handles the full article better.
• PDFs: Preview reads selectable text. A scanned PDF with no text layer will read nothing at all, because there is no text there to speak.

Third party text to speech apps for Mac, and which are actually offline

Third party text to speech apps for Mac mostly sell you either better voices or a better reading environment, and VoicePrivate's honest read is that the second is the more defensible reason to pay. Judge each one on where the synthesis happens:

• NaturalReader: a desktop reading app for Mac and Windows, also offered on the web, iOS, Android and as a Chrome extension. NaturalReader's own software page lists Free Voices on the free version and MP3 conversion only on paid plans, so if offline operation is the point, confirm which voices are local downloads before paying.
• Speechify: a reading app built around a large voice library, with apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and the web plus browser extensions. Speechify's Mac page does not say which voices work offline, so test it with Wi-Fi off before you rely on it for confidential text.
• ElevenLabs: the current benchmark for expressive synthetic voices. ElevenLabs' own Mac guide has you use it in the browser, with generation done on its service. Excellent for produced audio, not an option for text you cannot send to a server.
• Read and Write, from Texthelp: commonly issued by universities and workplaces as an assistive toolbar, with a Mac app alongside Windows, Chrome and iPad versions. Worth asking your institution about before buying anything, since it may already be licensed for you.
• Balabolka: Windows only, despite how often it turns up in Mac searches. Running it under Wine or a virtual machine is technically possible and practically miserable. Use the macOS built ins instead.

VoicePrivate's advice before you pay for any of them: spend ten minutes with a Premium or Siri voice in Read & Speak. On a 2026 Mac the built in voices are close enough that a lot of people find the extra spend buys them a document library rather than better speech.

The say command: save Mac text to speech as an audio file

VoicePrivate's pick for bulk text to speech on a Mac, and for saving speech as an audio file, is the say command. It has shipped with macOS for years and runs offline with whatever system voice you have installed, and it does the one thing Speak selection does not, which is convert files to audio without a subscription.

• say "Hello, this is a test" speaks the text straight away
• say -v Ava "Your text here" uses a specific installed voice
• say -f document.txt -o output.aiff turns a text file into an audio file
• say -r 200 "Faster speech rate" sets the rate in words per minute
• say -v "?" lists every voice currently installed on the Mac

Batch work is where this earns its keep. A folder of drafts becomes a folder of audio files with a one line shell loop, entirely on the machine, with no upload and no per character pricing. It is the offline text to speech workflow that has been sitting in macOS the whole time.

Text to speech versus voice typing on a Mac

Text to speech on a Mac turns your text into audio, and VoicePrivate works in the other direction: voice typing, also called dictation, turns your speech into text. People searching for one often want the other, so here is the short version of the second direction.

Apple's built in macOS Dictation is free, lives in the same System Settings area, and is genuinely fine for short notes and messages. Where it runs out of road is long documents, professional vocabulary, and transcribing recorded audio files. VoicePrivate is the paid on device alternative: it runs the speech recognition on the Mac itself at $84 a year or $9.99 a month, so the audio is not uploaded to a transcription service and dictation keeps working with the network off. There is no free tier. Individual monthly and annual plans include a 7-day free trial, a card is required, and $0 is due today.

Start 7-Day Free Trial. Card required; $0 today. Cancel before day seven and you will not be charged.

The deeper comparisons live on their own pages: VoicePrivate's speech to text on Mac guide covers when built in dictation is enough, VoicePrivate vs macOS Dictation puts the two side by side, and Mac dictation not working is the fix list when the microphone or the shortcut stops responding.

What Mac text to speech still cannot do

Offline text to speech on a Mac has real limits, and VoicePrivate would rather name them than let you find them at hour two of a long document:

• Emotional range: on device voices stay fairly level. Conveying excitement, grief or sarcasm convincingly is where cloud services such as ElevenLabs are still ahead, and those are not offline.
• Specialist pronunciation: drug names, case citations, surnames and acronyms get mangled. The Pronunciations list in Read & Speak is the fix, and it is manual, one entry at a time.
• Reading things that are not text: a scanned PDF, an image of a slide, or text baked into a screenshot will not read, because there is no text layer to speak from.
• Automatic capture from the web: cloud readers hook into browsers and cloud drives and queue articles for you. The macOS built ins mostly wait for you to select something first.

Apple Silicon has made the local half of this move quickly, and Accessibility Reader arriving as a system wide feature is a fair sign of the direction. The expressive voice gap is the one still worth watching.

Mac text to speech FAQ, answered by VoicePrivate

What is the text to speech shortcut on a Mac?

VoicePrivate's answer from Apple's documentation: Option-Esc speaks the text you have selected once Speak selection is turned on in System Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak, and pressing Option-Esc again stops it. Command-Esc opens Accessibility Reader for a whole page, and Command-F5 turns VoiceOver on or off. To change the Option-Esc combination, click the info button next to Speak selection and press a new shortcut.

How can I make my Mac speak text aloud?

Select the text and press Option-Esc. VoicePrivate's one setup note is that Speak selection has to be turned on first in System Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak, which is called Spoken Content on Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia. For a whole web page or document, press Command-Esc to open Accessibility Reader and use its play control. For a text file you want kept as audio, the say command in Terminal saves the speech to a file.

Does a Mac have built in text to speech?

Yes. VoicePrivate checked Apple's current documentation: text to speech is built into macOS, with nothing to install and no account to create. On macOS 27 Golden Gate and macOS Tahoe 26 the controls sit in System Settings, then Accessibility, then Read & Speak, which is the pane Apple named Spoken Content on Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia. Turn on Speak selection, highlight any text in any app, and press Option-Esc to hear it read aloud in the system voice. VoicePrivate is dictation software rather than a text to speech app, so this guide points you at Apple's built in tools instead of selling you a reader.

How do you turn off text to speech on a Mac?

VoicePrivate's fix for a Mac that will not stop talking: open System Settings, click Accessibility in the sidebar, click Read & Speak, then switch off the specific toggle that is talking: Speak selection for the Option-Esc shortcut, Speak announcements for spoken dialogs and alerts, Speak typing feedback for spoken keystrokes, and Speak item under the pointer for spoken hover labels. To stop a document mid sentence rather than disable the feature, press the same shortcut again or use the stop button on the on screen controller. VoicePrivate wrote this section because the accidental Option-Esc press is the most common reason a Mac starts reading out loud on its own.

Does Mac text to speech work offline?

Yes, once the voice is downloaded, and VoicePrivate treats that as the key test for any reader. macOS text to speech renders speech on the Mac using a voice file stored on the drive, so after you download a voice through Manage Voices the reading works with Wi-Fi switched off. The download step itself needs the internet, and higher quality voices are larger downloads, which is why the Manage Voices sheet shows a size next to each one. This matters more than it sounds: Microsoft says the natural voices in Edge Read Aloud need an active internet connection and only a basic set of voices works offline. VoicePrivate applies the same on device standard to dictation.

Can Apple VoiceOver work offline?

Yes. VoicePrivate's answer: VoiceOver is the macOS screen reader rather than a text to speech reader, but it speaks with the same downloaded system voices, so once a voice is on the Mac VoiceOver keeps talking with the network off. Turn it on with Command-F5. The parts that can still want a connection are the things around the speech, such as content that has to load before it can be described, not the speech synthesis itself. VoicePrivate takes the same view of dictation: the recognition should run locally so the feature does not disappear when the connection does.

Can an older Mac use text to speech offline?

Yes. VoicePrivate checked Apple's archived help pages: Big Sur and Monterey keep the feature in System Preferences, Accessibility, Spoken Content, with Speak selection on Option-Esc, and Catalina calls the pane Speech, with a checkbox named Speak selected text when the key is pressed. The system voices on those versions are stored on the Mac, so reading works offline once a voice is installed. Intel Macs cannot move to macOS 27 Golden Gate, which runs only on Apple silicon, so this is the path most older Macs will use.

How do I talk instead of typing on my Mac?

You want dictation, which VoicePrivate makes, and it is the opposite direction from text to speech: your voice becomes text on screen instead of your text becoming audio. Apple's built in macOS Dictation is free and fine for short notes. VoicePrivate is the paid on device option at $84 a year or $9.99 a month, and it runs the recognition on the Mac itself, so nothing is uploaded to a transcription service and dictation still works with the network off. There is no free tier. Individual monthly and annual plans include a 7-day free trial, a card is required, and $0 is due today.

Related VoicePrivate guides on Mac speech and dictation

• Speech to Text on Mac, the other direction: how macOS Dictation works and when to upgrade past it.
• macOS Speech to Text, what Apple's built in dictation does, what it does not, and where its limits show.
• Mac Voice to Text Privacy, what each Mac dictation app actually does with your voice data.
• Mac Transcription Software, the buyer guide for turning recorded audio and video into text on a Mac.
• Offline Speech to Text on Mac, transcribing audio with no internet connection at all.
• On Device Voice to Text, how VoicePrivate keeps the recognition step on your machine.
• Best Offline Voice to Text Software for Mac, the dictation apps that keep working with Wi-Fi off.