I'm goofing around currently, using the Mac OS/X text-to-speech capability. I'm writing an AppleScript "alarm clock" program to wake me up in the morning. As I started digging into the text to speech capability I learned that there are a number of voices built into Mac OS/X. If you ever want to use this functionality, here's a list of the voices built into the system:

Agnes
Kathy
Princess
Vicki
Victoria

Bruce
Fred
Junior
Ralph

Albert
Bad News
Bahh
Bells
Boing
Bubbles
Cellos 
Deranged
Good News
Hysterical
Pipe Organ
Trinoids
Whisper
Zarvox

You can experiment with these voices on your Mac by choosing System Preferences, Speech, then clicking the "Text to Speech" tab. Now choose a value for the System Voice, and then press the Play button. You can keep changing the System Voice and clicking the Play button to here samples of what each voice sounds like.

As part of my alarm clock programming effort, I'm starting my "wake up" effort with some computer voices. Here's what the first part of my AppleScript program looks like:

say "Good morning Al." using "Whisper"
delay 2
say "Al, it's time to rise and shine." using "Fred"
delay 1
say "The current time is" using "Vicky"
say (time string of (current date)) using "Vicky"
delay 2
say "Wake up sleepy head" using "Trinoids"
delay 2
say "You asked us to wake you up at this time." using "Victoria"
delay 2
say "It's time to wake up, it's time to wake up!" using "cellos"

If you want to run this on your Mac, just go to your Applications folder, open the AppleScript folder, then start the Script Editor. Copy and paste the text above into your Script Editor, then press the Run button. You should hear each of the phrases above spoken by your computer.

(What I'm actually getting around to is starting off with initial text like this, and then launching iTunes at whatever time I specify in the morning ... but I'll save that for another blog entry.)