My wife and I were sitting around tonight surfing the Web on our computers when she started browsing the Missed Connections section of Craiglist, which we consider the more amusing section to browse. While she was reading one of the entries aloud I had a funny idea, which turned out to be even better in practice.

On my Mac I went into System Preference -> Speech and then clicked the Text-to-Speech tab. Next, I enabled the Speak selected text when the key is pressed option. Then I clicked Set Key and assigned the text-to-speech function to Shift+Control+S, though one can choose any key combo that’s preferred. I chose “Alex” as the current voice.

As soon as this was enabled I pulled up a somewhat random missed connections entry, highlight the text, hit the key combo, and laughed as the computer voice spoke several lines, including one that read “I may have lost my wedding ring when I fingered your a**hole”.

I realize this isn’t a new concept. Heck, in the early 1990’s I played around with text-to-speech on a 286. But it’s much more fun these days with so much user generated content available on the Web. Typing words for the computer to read is nowhere near as entertaining as having it speak messages from random people in various contexts. We also found Texts from Last Night well suited to this waste of time.