How to set up voice time notifications on Mac

When working with a Mac, in certain situations, you want to see the time but cannot exit the home screen. In this case, you can set your Mac to notify by reading aloud in real time every 15 minutes, half an hour, or 1 hour. This is a pretty cool hidden feature that you can find in System Preferences. How to set up as follows.

First, open System Preferences on your Mac by clicking on the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen and clicking on the “System Preferences” entry from the menu that appears.

On the “System Preferences” interface in macOS Catalina or earlier, click “Date & Time”. For macOS 11 Big Sur or later, click “Dock & Menu Bar”.

Next, if you are using macOS Catalina or earlier, click the “Clock” tab in the “Date & Time” option. In macOS Big Sur and up, scroll down to the “Dock & Menu Bar” sidebar and click “Clock”.

Once you are in the “Clock” setting interface, check the box to the left of the option “Announce the time”. Then, by getting into the drop-down menu, you can choose the timestamp you want your Mac to read aloud. Three options are available: on the hour (one hour), on the half-hour (half-hour), or on the quarter-hour (15 minutes).

For example, if you select “On the quarter-hour”, you will hear notifications at 2:00 pm, 2:15 pm, 2:30 pm, and 2:45 pm. The system will say: “It’s two o’clock” or “It’s two forty-five”.

If you want to change the voice tone louder the time, click the button “Customize Voice”. On that screen, you can choose a male or female voice and also adjust the speed of the voice.