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I replaced macOS say with sayneat, a local text-to-speech CLI. Six voices handled the same stubborn build very differently.

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I replaced macOS say with sayneat, a local text-to-speech CLI. Six voices handled the same stubborn build very differently.

There is a macOS terminal trick I have used for years:

some-long-running-task; say "task is done, exited $?"

The shell starts say after the task exits, and the expanded $? tells me whether it worked. The command can run in a tmux window buried beneath several sessions. I do not have to keep checking it or trust that I will notice a terminal badge. My computer speaks when it needs me.

I use this often enough that I also gave the habit to my coding agents. If an agent reaches a point where it needs my attention, it can speak instead of waiting silently in another terminal.

Apple’s say is old in the useful Unix sense. It joins unquoted arguments into a sentence, reads stdin when no words are supplied, accepts -v for a voice and -o for a file, and returns a meaningful exit status. It uses the macOS Speech Synthesis Manager, needs no network, and has been stable enough to become muscle memory.

The mechanism is excellent. The voice is not. Even Apple’s better downloadable voices retain the cadence of an older accessibility synthesizer, especially after hearing current speech models from OpenAI or ElevenLabs. A status message does not need to pass for an audiobook, but the difference becomes irritating once you know how natural generated speech can sound.

That small irritation produced two tools. The first was a shell script called saynice. The second became sayneat, a local-first text-to-speech command that has now replaced both say and saynice in my terminal.

saynice scratched the itch quickly. It wrapped OpenAI’s /v1/audio/speech endpoint, used gpt-4o-mini-tts by default, and streamed the response from curl into ffplay. Its command-line shape stayed close enough to say that changing an existing notification was easy. I wrote about that first version at the time in I gave my terminal a voice worth listening to.

some-long-running-task; saynice "task is done, exited $?"

The result changed how the computer felt. A short spoken message no longer sounded like a system alert assembled from phonemes. It sounded like somebody inside the machine had noticed the build finish and told me about it.

For a small personal script, saynice was good. It accepted inline text or stdin, offered OpenAI’s voices, and could save audio instead of playing it. I started using it everywhere, including the instructions I gave agents.

Its limits were equally plain. Every message left my computer. Every message needed a network connection and a paid API. Playback also depended on curl, jq, and ffplay. If I was offline, handling text that should remain local, or working on a machine without the right collection of command-line tools, the friendly voice disappeared.

I did not want to return to the old voice. I wanted the same quality and the same Unix-shaped interface without making a remote request the default.

Looking back, saynice proved two parts of the idea. Neural speech was good enough to hear throughout a working day, and preserving the shape of say mattered more than exposing every provider option. Its limitation was structural. OpenAI was not one engine behind the command; the HTTP request, voice list, error format, dependencies, and playback path were the command.

sayneat keeps the lesson and reverses that dependency. The command owns input, output, playback, and model selection. OpenAI is one optional engine beside ElevenLabs and four local choices. That distinction is what lets the same short invocation work offline without pretending remote providers are unnecessary.

sayneat is a Rust program built around that decision. On its first run, it inspects available CPU threads and memory, displays every supported engine, and asks which one to install. It does not quietly choose a paid service.

The current catalog has four local engines and two remote ones:

After selection, sayneat downloads local weights into the operating system’s application cache, verifies their SHA-256 hashes, and stores the default model and voice in its configuration. The program itself remains one native binary. Model weights stay separate, which keeps updates and model changes practical.

Remote engines remain available because they are useful. They require ELEVENLABS_API_KEY or OPENAI_API_KEY in the environment, and sayneat never writes those keys into its config. Selecting one sends the spoken text to that provider and may cost money. That boundary is visible instead of being hidden behind an apparently local command.

I wanted a comparison that resembled an actual notification but gave each synthesizer more work than “done.” The time and test count exercise number normalization. The first sentence is long enough to expose pacing, while the short second sentence tests whether the voice can change cadence without prompting.

At 3:17, the stubborn build finally passed all 42 tests. Put the kettle on.

The commands below use one shell variable:

TEXT='At 3:17, the stubborn build finally passed all 42 tests. Put the kettle on.'

I generated every sample on the same Mac on August 24, 2026. These are complete first attempts. I changed no speed or pronunciation settings. saynice and sayneat wrote the MP3 files directly. macOS say wrote AIFF, which I converted to MP3 for consistent browser playback.

This is the baseline. say delegates to the speech system already installed on the Mac. It starts without a model download, an account, another binary, or a network request. I chose Samantha so the sample does not depend on whichever system voice happens to be configured on a reader’s Mac.

say -v Samantha -o macos-say-samantha.aiff "$TEXT"