If you are working from home, chances are you find it hard to keep a track of the time. Sure, you could look at the clock on your menu bar, but that’s easy to forget when you’re knee deep in a project. Fortunately, Macs have long had a feature that makes them announce the time at regular intervals. Unfortunately, that option can’t be found in its usual place with macOS Big Sur. Well, if you’re wondering how to make your Mac speak the time, here is how to use announce time in macOS Big Sur.
How to Use Announce Time in macOS Big Sur
Using time announcements is a wonderful way to ensure you’re sticking to your deadlines on a daily basis. Plus, it helps to be aware of the time throughout the day which is great for time tracking and management. Especially when you are stuck at home all day. I will also be telling you of a neat automation that will automatically mute your Mac at night. This way, you won’t be disturbed with time announcements while you’re asleep.
How to Enable or Disable Announce Time in macOS Big Sur
- Open System Preferences and click on Dock & Menu Bar.
- Scroll down on the side bar and select ‘Clock’.
- Here you will find an option to enable (or disable) ‘Announce the time’.
- You can set the time interval at which you want time announcements to be made. You can set this to on the hour, quarterly, and half-hour time intervals.
How to Customise Announce Time Voice in Mac
Now that you have enabled the feature, you might want to customise the voice used for the announcement as well. Here’s how to do that.
- In the same menu, click on ‘Customise Voice…’
- Click on the ‘Voice’ dropdown.
- You will see the installed voices that you can choose from. Select one from these. Or, you can click ‘Customise…’.
- Here you can choose which voice to use from a huge list of options. You can also use the ‘use enhanced voice’ option to make the voice sound more natural.
How to Automatically Mute Your Mac at Night
If you are like me, you probably leave your Mac on throughout the day. However, with this feature, you will end up getting time announcements even at night when you’re asleep. Thankfully, there’s an easy fix thanks to awesome Mac apps like Keyboard Maestro.
- Open Keyboard Maestro (download) and select ‘Global Macro Group’ in the sidebar.
- Click on the plus icon to create a new macro.
- Name your Macro something like ‘Auto Mute’. Then, click on ‘New Trigger’.
- Select ‘Time of Day Trigger’ from the drop down.
- Set the time you want the trigger to be activated. As an example, I’m setting the time to 10 pm. You can also choose the days you want the automation to run.
- Click on ‘New Action’.
- Select ‘System Actions’ in categories, and double click ‘Toggle System Sound Mute’ to add it to your automation.
That’s it, the automation will run at 10 pm on the days you selected and will mute your Mac. So you won’t be disturbed by time announcements when you’re in bed.
Use Time Announcements in Mac to Keep Track of Your Day
Automatic time announcements are a great way of keeping track of your day. It’s also the best way for me to remember to fix lunch on time — something I tend to forget a lot of times until I’m very hungry. So are you using time announcements in macOS Big Sur? Let us know in the comments. Also, if you have any questions, let us know and we will try to help you out.
