say

name	say
description	Text-to-Speech via macOS say command with Siri Natural Voices. Use for generating speech audio, TTS clips, or speaking text aloud on macOS.
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say

Use say for on-device text-to-speech on macOS.

Siri Natural Voices (recommended)

Siri voices are the best macOS TTS voices but cannot be selected via -v. Instead, run say without -v — it uses the system default voice. Switch languages via defaults write:

# Switch to German
defaults write com.apple.speech.voice.prefs SystemTTSLanguage -string "de"
say "Hallo, wie geht's?" -o output_de.aiff

# Switch to Chinese (Mandarin)
defaults write com.apple.speech.voice.prefs SystemTTSLanguage -string "cmn"
say "你好，世界" -o output_zh.aiff

No process restart needed — the next say invocation picks up the new language immediately.

Prerequisites

Download the desired Siri voices first in System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content and set them as the system voice for each language.

Check which voices are currently configured:

defaults read com.apple.Accessibility SpokenContentDefaultVoiceSelectionsByLanguage