In today’s video, I’m going to teach you
How to use the text to speech function to improve your copywriting.
So just a caveat before I start, what I’m about to show you is on my Mac computer, I’m sure there is a similar function for PCs, but I’m not particularly PC savvy, so you might have to go and investigate that yourself.
So what I’m going to show you is how to use the text to speech function on your Mac to improve your copywriting.
Let’s get started.
Watch the video
So the first thing you’re going to need to do is open up your system preferences, which looks something like this.
And then you’re going to look for dictation and speech, give that a click. Now there is two functions here, we can use dictation or text to speech. We’re going to focus on text to speech today.
So first of all you can choose a voice. So you can go in here and you can customise the voice. I’ve chosen an Australian lady, called Karen, but you can choose whoever you want. You can have male, female, you can choose different voices, different accents, whatever you’d like to listen to. Then you can choose slow, normal or fast, so this is normal. Or you can do it super-fast. Wow that was full on. So I kind of do it slightly faster than normal which means I can get through more copy, more quickly.
Next what you’ll need to do is choose how you’re going to switch text to speech on. So you can set your own key up to turn it on. And I’ve chosen to go with option plus full stop. But if you don’t like that you can change the key here.
And then all you need to do is go to some copy that you’ve written, and first of all just highlight the copy that you want Karen, or whoever you’re using, to read out, and now just press the option button. I’m just going to turn my microphone down a little bit because Karen is a bit loud. So let’s just turn her down. And let’s press option and full stop.
And to turn her off, you just press the same key again, so option full stop is the one I’ve set up. You’ll set up your own one.
Now as you can see, she’s just literally reading out what I’ve written there, with a bit of intonation. So questions are she goes up a little bit at the end of the sentence and she notices all punctuation. What I find this really useful for is I have a tendency to omit words, or repeat words, which when you’re trying to proof your own copy, it’s really hard to spot these. Also Word is pretty good with spell checker, but if you’ve actually just used a real word that is a word that Word appreciates, but it’s not the one you wanted to, well then having it read to you is a great way to spot that.
It’s also a great way to spot punctuation problems. So if poor Karen sounds like she’s getting out of breath, maybe you need to shorten that sentence and add a full stop. So I use this a lot on video scripts, but I generally use it on all copy because I can’t afford to get every single word I write proof read. So this could really be helpful to those guys out there who are writing a lot of copy, who maybe don’t have a proofreader or editor on hand, just to make sure that your copy is in tip-top condition before you send it to your client.
So that’s it, today’s little tip was just showing you how to use text to speech to improve your copywriting.
Thanks for watching.
