Apple's (Macbook's) new TTS voices are not available

[MadNoMad27]

Hi,

First off, thanks for the add-on, it is great for language learning!

As the title says, I noticed that Apple added new voices for many languages that seem much better. They are called "Siri Voice 1, 2 etc.". For instance, their Swedish voice appears to be better than those offered by Google Cloud Text to Speech.
How can we use those voices for generating audio?

[kelciour]

If you don't see them in Anki using a built-in TTS,

{{tts-voices:}}

I'm afraid they're only available for Siri and can't be used by other programs based on this StackOverflow thread.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61122378/make-the-say-terminal-utility-and-nsspeechsynthesizer-work-with-siri-voices

It might not work with the latest Mac version with M1 chip, but in the past someone managed to use Soundflower (BlackHole or Loopback) and QuickTime Player to record audio and someone on Reddit used Piezo with a Keyboard Maestro macro to record audio for Anki. There's also Audio to Clipboard script that used BlackHole. But I don't have Mac and can't test or help with it.

• https://gist.github.com/mculp/4b95752e25c456d425c6#gistcomment-3481616
• https://www.reddit.com/r/MassImmersionApproach/comments/if7791/mac_alternative_for_sharex_audio_recording_for/
• https://game2text.com/resources/macos/audio-to-clipboard/

As a possible alternative, Microsoft Azure seems to have a few Swedish neural voices.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/#overview