Changing system('say') command values

Making MATLAB to speak on a Mac can be done with system('say hello world') but how to modify the existing system('say') function values? how to specify the system voice name and speak the text from a file or a variable?

Does anybody have tried and succeeded for Chinese? system('say 你好')

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

system('say -v VoiceNameHere -f FileNameHere')

[william]

Thank you for your reply,,,this was the output of the command after trying it Input text is not UTF-8 encoded..

is there any way of doing it, not from a text file but from a double or string variable?

[Walter Roberson]

str = char([20320 22909]);
system( sprintf('say -v VoiceNameHere %s', str) )

My expectation would be that that will fail, considering the error message you saw. To get the UTF-8 using a file:

fid = fopen('FileNameHere', 'w', 'UTF-8');
fwrite(fid, char([20320 22909]), 'char');
fclose(fid);

and then the system() I showed above.

Why did I use [20320 22909] ? I looked up the characters at http://www.khngai.com/chinese/tools/codechar.php?code=%E5%A5%BD

With my Mac and MATLAB set up the way it is at the moment, I am not able to copy-and-paste the Chinese characters from another window into a MATLAB string. I am not certain if that could be changed.

[william]

Thank you for your comment,,,I was able to perform this with the following script

feature('DefaultCharacterSet', 'UTF-8')%twice
str = char([20320 22909]);

system( sprintf('say -v Mei %s', str) ) %Taiwanese voice
system( sprintf('say -v Ting %s', str) ) %Main land China voice

Answer 2

[Carlos Gonzalez]

myString = "hello world";
command = strcat('say',{' '},myString);
system(command)

Where myString is the text you wish for your mac to speak.