Your Mac’s Speak Announcements feature belongs to Apple’s Accessibility settings, which include several features designed to help more people access and navigate their devices efficiently.
When enabled, your Mac will speak out the text in notification messages. It will also notify you when you need to perform certain actions in apps.
How to Enable Speak Announcements
Before you get started, make sure that this feature works on your Mac: it’s only available for Macs running macOS Sierra and later.
To make your Mac announce notifications and alerts:
Go to System Preferences > Accessibility.
Click Spoken Content.
Enable the box beside Speak announcements.
Accessibility Spoken Content Options
This feature is also fully customizable. You can choose the voice you prefer and the phrase you want to hear before the text is announced. To modify the Voice, Phrase, and Delay, click Options.
Here are the options it gives you:
Voice: By default, your Mac uses System Voice. Click the dropdown menu beside Voice to select another voice if you want.
Delay: You can set a delay from 0 to 60 seconds before your Mac speaks an announcement or notification.
Phrase: You have several options for the phrase you want to hear before your Mac announces a notification. By default, your Mac will state the app’s name associated with the notification. You can choose from available phrases like “Pardon me” or “Attention,” or you can set a custom phrase. Just click Edit Phrase List > Add, then type the phrase in the text box and hit OK.
Spoken Announcement Customization
To disable this feature, simply head back to System Preferences > Accessibility > Spoken Content, then deselect Speak Announcements.
