Remote Say
In college, my roommate and I would use our Macs to play a prank on friends. We would tell these people that “Macs could can hold a conversation just like a normal person.” Once they believed this fib, we would use one Mac to log into the other Mac via SSH. Then we would use the “say” command to make the Mac “talk” with the person. (You can read more on how to do that here.)
It is very fun to see what people choose to ask computers. It’s equally fun to see reactions to the Mac response.
We decided to create Remote Say so everyone could play along.
How To Use:
If you have two Macs on the same network, all you have to do is start up Remote Say on each computer. Using Bonjour, this application will find all the other Macs on the network running Remote Say. Use the drop down list to choose the machine you want to speak thru and you’re all set. Just type the words and hit return. The other Mac will speak.
Things you need to know:
-This is a beta app. (Yes, I know it’s brave throwing it in the brightest freeware spotlight on the web.) It’s been tested on both Intel machines and PPC machines and has worked well, but you may see different results. There are certainly more features planned, but we want to let the fun begin. Please send in any comments, suggestions, or bug reports.
– The receiving machine requires a little pause between sentences sometimes. I don’t know why yet.
– The mac will use the default voice on your machine. You can change the System Voice in System Preferences -> Speech.
– It’s just a simple app, but it’s really quite fun.
Things to be added in future versions:
– The ability to add an ip address so it can be used with macs on different networks.
– Use the up arrow to cycle thru previous sentences
– Receive a message to inform whether the the sentence was spoken or not.
– Use microphone on receiver end to hear the other half of the conversation.
Download:
Remote Say has gone open source. You can dive in here.
Credit:
A special thanks to Jan for putting this app together with me. Thanks to Dale for the great icon.