Premium Text-to-Speech Voices for macOS

Recently I discovered that macOS ships with premium text-to-speech voices that sound significantly better than the default ones. Here's how to use them.

Installing a Premium Voice

Premium voices need to be downloaded first. Here's how to install one:

  1. Open System Settings → Accessibility
  2. Under Vision, click Spoken Content
  3. Click the (i) next to System Voice
  4. Click Voice
  5. Search for a premium voice (e.g., "Zoe (Premium)")
  6. Click the cloud icon to download and install

Using Premium Voices

Once installed, you can use the say command from the terminal with the -v flag:

say -v 'Zoe (Premium)' "Hello, this is a premium voice"

To list all available voices and verify your installation:

say -v '?'

How I Discovered This

I was building a wrapper for Claude Code that adds speech to text and text to speech in the terminal (all local). While testing different voices, I stumbled on macOS's premium TTS voices – and they're surprisingly good.

Double-tap Tab: start voice recording Claude Stop hook → Sonnet/Haiku evaluates response → Summarizes → Read