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.
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
- How to Customise Announce Time Voice in Mac
- How to Automatically Mute Your Mac at Night
How to Enable or Disable Announce Time in macOS Big Sur
Open System Preferences and click on Dock & Menu Bar.
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.
- You will see the installed voices that you can choose from. Select one from these. Or, you can click ‘Customise…’.
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 ‘New Action’.
