Announce new emails using the built-in Mac OS X speech engine
When I’m at home in the evenings, I’m rarely sat looking at my MacBook Pro. Usually it’s idle on the dining room table – playing music through iTunes, or streaming a movie to the TV in the lounge. I thought it would be handy if when a new email arrives, it could read out the sender’s name and the subject of the email, so I could decide whether to go and look at it – instead of just hearing the new email notification sound.
Luckily, I found an AppleScript that did much of the hard work for me, I just customized it slightly. This is my first foray into the world of AppleScript – so coders go easy on me! There’s a couple of interesting features -
- if iTunes or QuickTime Player are playing, the script will pause them temporarily while it announces the email
- if the volume is turned down low, it’ll temporarily set it to 50% to announce the email
- if the screensaver is active, and the volume is low, it’ll temporarily set the volume to 60% (assumes you’re not far from your computer)
- if the email arrives during office hours (Mon-Fri 8am-6pm), it won’t announce (because I use my Mac at work)
- if Entourage is the foremost window when the email arrives, it won’t announce
Being a script, you can change the settings as you please, and modifying it to use Apple Mail instead of Microsoft Entourage should be a doddle.
Speak new email.zip (16KB)
Once downloaded, all you need to do is create a rule to run the script when a new email arrives in Entourage…
