Thursday, April 15, 2010

How to make your computer talk/speak what you type

Here’s a cool little feature of Windows that can be abused so that you can make your computer talk or speak whatever you tell it! This method takes advantage of a built-in API installed on most Windows XP machines called SAPI (Speech Application Programming Interface).

The Microsoft Speech API is what is used for the Narrative accessibility feature built into Windows. You can also write programs that call the API, which would allow you to let your applications speak.

But making your computer say what you want is pretty easy actually! Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Open Notepad and paste the following text into a new document:

Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox(“Enter the text you want spoken”,”Speak This”)
Set sapi=CreateObject(“sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message

It should basically look something like this:

make computer speak

Now when you go to save the file, give it any name, but make sure you also type .VBS after the name. Also, for the Save as type box, choose All files instead of the default Text Documents.

make computer talk

Now double-click on the VBS file and you should see a input box where you can type in the text you want spoken! Go ahead and type something and click OK.

speak computer

That’s it! Your computer will speak to you in the default voice, which for me was some scary seductive male type of voice! What about yours? Enjoy (This would be fun to do on someone else’s computer as a joke.)


Please comment and let me know in either cases if it works for your or not? I'll be here to help you out.

No Right Click script

No Selection Script