How to make your computer talk/speak what you type

Posted on November 3, 2008 at 5:25 am

Here’s a cool little feature of Windows that can be abused so that you can make your computer talk or speak whatever you tell it! This method takes advantage of a built-in API installed on most Windows XP machines called SAPI (Speech Application Programming Interface).

The Microsoft Speech API is what is used for the Narrative accessibility feature built into Windows. You can also write programs that call the API, which would allow you to let your applications speak.

But making your computer say what you want is pretty easy actually! Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Open Notepad and paste the following text into a new document:

Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox(”Enter the text you want spoken”,”Speak This”)
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message

It should basically look something like this:

Now when you go to save the file, give it any name, but make sure you also type .VBS after the name. Also, for the Save as type box, choose All files instead of the default Text Documents.

Now double-click on the VBS file and you should see a input box where you can type in the text you want spoken! Go ahead and type something and click OK.

That’s it! Your computer will speak to you in the default voice, which for me was some scary seductive male type of voice! What about yours? Enjoy (This would be fun to do on someone else’s computer as a joke.)

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35 Responses to “How to make your computer talk/speak what you type”

Voltz83 said on : November 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 am

if I put code like this:

Dim message, sapi
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak “Who are you?”

And then I set it to run at restart on someone’s pc, so when it restart… Will it work???

Thank

Odoiporos said on : November 3rd, 2008 at 3:47 pm

not working for me…
it says:
LINE: 2
CHAR: 18
ERROR: INVALID CHARACTER
CODE: 800A0408
SOURCE: MICROSOFT VBSCRIPT COMPILATION ERROR

can you tell me what am I doing wrong????

Odoiporos said on : November 3rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm

ok, ok. I found it!!!
the ” character was wrong. Ok, it works great! Thanks…

Odoiporos said on : November 3rd, 2008 at 4:10 pm

How can I change the voice????

John Williams said on : November 4th, 2008 at 9:17 pm

Your instructions worked well, the computer speaks, my kids thought it was very cool.

Randy Brinkley said on : November 6th, 2008 at 5:17 pm

i tried to do this but i keep getting the same error codeINE: 2
CHAR: 18
ERROR: INVALID CHARACTER
CODE: 800A0408

Jenn said on : November 7th, 2008 at 7:55 am

I think it’s only for XP computers??? Won’t work on vista for me anyway.

Herman Mertens said on : November 7th, 2008 at 1:37 pm

Thanks, the kids love it, especially since I added a loop:

Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox(”Enter the text you want spoken”,”speak this”)
set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
For i=1 to 10
sapi. Speak message
Next

Fred said on : November 9th, 2008 at 1:29 am

Here is the corrected code:

Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox(”Enter the text you want spoken”, “Speak This”)
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message

Aaron said on : November 9th, 2008 at 11:03 pm

Randy if you copied and pasted the text from the website you will have to go back in and change the ” marks to your own. You will manually have to type them into the code. They dont copy and paste right. That should fix your problem.

Anonymous said on : November 11th, 2008 at 7:20 pm

Everyone, if you receive the error message when attempting to open the file, replace the copied quotation marks (all of them) by pressing the quotation key when each is highlighted. It doesn’t recognize the quotations provided.

Babak said on : November 12th, 2008 at 7:16 am

You have to change all ” to ”
Or you will get a character error.

bish said on : November 13th, 2008 at 2:43 am

ummmmmm its not working for me theres an error same as all the other peoples on line two

please explain

markell said on : November 19th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

Thanks it works

Al said on : December 3rd, 2008 at 11:34 am

Hey this is great. I was wondering if there is something I can add to the script that will keep the box from disappearing after I enter the phrase I want spoken.

Jeff said on : December 14th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

Hey, very cool! I’m driving my wife crazy.

Same question as Al: can we keep the box from disappearing?

akishore said on : December 15th, 2008 at 12:11 am

@Jeff - You can prevent the box from disappearing by putting the entire thing in a For or While loop. You’ll need to know a bit of VBScript code in order to do this though. I’ll see if I can try to modify it myself and then post in here in the comments. But if you are technically savvy, you can search in Google for “VBScript while loop”, etc and see if you can get it to work. Feel bad for the wife! haha

Michael said on : December 19th, 2008 at 9:44 pm

This is so cool! Can you tell us how to make it loop? thanks.

G said on : January 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm

when you add:

Dim message, sapi
message=InputBox(”Enter the text you want spoken”, “Speak This”)
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message

change manually change the ” because it reads it wrong in notepad…then it should work

ed said on : January 15th, 2009 at 12:35 am

Really cool thanks my kids got a kick out this.

Dig said on : January 28th, 2009 at 3:23 pm

this is pretty cool! but the voice isnt
is there a website to change the voice?

krystaljg12 said on : January 30th, 2009 at 2:25 am

not working for me…
it says:
LINE: 2
CHAR: 18
ERROR: INVALID CHARACTER
CODE: 800A0408
SOURCE: MICROSOFT VBSCRIPT COMPILATION ERROR

can you tell me what am I doing wrong????

home loan said on : January 30th, 2009 at 3:36 am

Lovely. Great site.

danielle said on : February 2nd, 2009 at 9:23 am

this is cool and effective but how can you change the voice?

sound2man said on : February 4th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

Ran this script in a remote script program to wierd out my coworkers. With a slight modification, you can make it say anything you like without a popup.

Dim message, sapi
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak “INSERT TEXT HERE

Richard said on : February 7th, 2009 at 8:22 am

It works great. I have vista and did have to delete the quotation marks and retype them in.

Is there a way to record it in a .wav or similar file?

ocracoke387 said on : February 7th, 2009 at 8:48 pm

Have tried all suggestions listed and changed fonts…I still get the same error everyone else does…what is the problem…can anyone help??

Me said on : February 26th, 2009 at 12:33 am

heres my code, i just added a loop

Dim message, sapi
Do
message=InputBox(”Enter the text you want spoken”, “Speak This”)
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message
Loop

then the dialogue box reappears after the speech.

Justin said on : February 26th, 2009 at 5:00 am

I lost my voice so I made a slight twist on this.

Dim message, sapi
do
message=InputBox(”Enter the text you want spoken”,”Speak This”)
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message
loop until message = “”

Will keep going until you hit cancel, close it with the x in the top right, alt+f4, or just hit OK or enter on a blank box.

It just sat in the background while I was working and then could alt+tab when I needed it.

Oh, and notepad doesn’t have “fonts”, so I don’t know what you were using, unless it was wordpad.

joyscog said on : March 29th, 2009 at 8:29 pm

it is not showing me any typing box and i did everything right:(

GKL® said on : April 9th, 2009 at 5:07 am

Hi Sound2Man,

Can you give me somes tips or the code you used for the below????? as I have been wanting to do that for ages at work…

Cheers

GKL®
———————
sound2man said on : February 4th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

Ran this script in a remote script program to wierd out my coworkers. With a slight modification, you can make it say anything you like without a popup.

Dim message, sapi
Set sapi=CreateObject(”sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak “INSERT TEXT HERE

David said on : April 18th, 2009 at 12:29 pm

Hi Guys,
I am running Windows XP
I type the vbs code as instructed and I changed the quotation marks and I still am getting an error Line 2 Character 18 Error 800A0408
Origen Error in the compilation of Microsoft VBscript

particle man said on : April 24th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

how do you change the voice?

FEEX said on : May 2nd, 2009 at 9:17 pm

Guys, what you have to do is copy and past the code into Notepad, but delete and re-make the quotes (”")….must re-make all of the “.