Say, Say, Say

No, not the song (which thankfully isn’t in the iTunes Music Store, but sadly I do own a copy of via a Paul McCartney greatest hits CD) — but the OS X command

I mentioned my little baseball drafting application earlier, but what I didn’t mention was that it was made possible by OS X and Fink — which let me run Apache, PHP, and MySQL pretty easily on a laptop. (okay, okay, I’ve done this on Windows too).

Well, on a lark, I added a simple exec(‘/usr/bin/say’) call to the “Draft this Player” feature of my application.

Say is a command line interface into the OS X speech engine. Allowing you to speak or output to a .aiff file whatever string or input you pass to it.

And draft day was spent with the computer generated echoes of “The Cleveland Indians select…”

What a great little feature. I love OS X.

(bonus for the Macintosh using readers — for grins and giggles try “say Ricky Bottalico” from your shell and explain that one to me)