A College Assignment was Never so Much Fun

Having a Mac has its own frills and tons of advantages. What you can do is limited only by your creativity. I sure knew that, but recently when I had to submit an assignment at college, I found a cool new way to complete it using my Mac.

Now since our college does not accept typewritten assignments, I had to write it manually. After some research on the internet, I collected information and organized it in Mac's built in text editor TextEdit. After adding in my knowledge too, it started getting quite lengthy. I usually avoid printing unless it is absolutely necessary and to write looking at the Mac seemed time consuming. While trying to figure out a better way to do it, I found the Speech option in the TextEdit's Edit menu. I quickly configured System Preferences to start and stop speaking selected text by a key combination and reduced the speed at which Victoria (Victoria is  a voice in Leopard, which I felt was the clearest) would speak. And there you have it - Mac dictates and I write.

But keeping up with that speed while writing was not my cup of tea. Besides, it would either repeat the entire selected text when I asked it to speak again, or I would have to reselect the text omitting the part that I've already written. I knew I had seen a solution to this while playing around with Automator.

Command+Space > Typed "au", hit the Return key, and Automator was up and running. I created a workflow that had actions arranged this way:

• Get contents of TextEdit document
• Text to Audio file

Opened my document in TextEdit and executed the workflow and I had an AIFF file on my desktop. I opened it in iTunes and now everything seemed in place. I could see the text in TextEdit if required and had iTunes dictate to me the contents. With the media keys, it was not necessary for me to keep iTunes as the frontmost application. I could pause the playback whenever I felt Victoria was speaking too fast and could resume it with the press of a key. I could complete my assignment very quickly that way.

Completing an assignment was never so much fun :)