If you work from home, you’re likely to struggle with keeping track of time. Sure, you can watch the clock on your menu bar, but that’s easy to forget when you’re on your knees in a project. Fortunately, Macs have long had a feature that allows them to announce the time at regular intervals. Unfortunately, this option is not in its usual place with macOS Big Sur. Well, if you’re wondering how to make your Mac speak the time, here’s how to use Announce Time in macOS Big Sur.
How to Use Announcement Time in macOS Big Sur
Using time announcements is a great way to make sure you meet your deadlines on a daily basis. Plus, it’s useful to know the time throughout the day, which is great for tracking and time management. Especially when you’re stuck at home all day. I’ll also tell you about some neat automation that will automatically mute your Mac at night. This way, you won’t be disturbed by time announcements while you sleep.
How to Enable or Disable Announcement Time in macOS Big Sur
- Open System Preferences and click Dock & Menu Bar.
- Scroll down the sidebar and select ‘Clock’.
- Here you will find an option to enable (or disable) “Announce time”.
- You can set the time interval at which you want hourly announcements to be made. You can set it to hour, quarter and half hour time intervals.
How to Customize the Voice of the Hour Announcement on Mac
Now that you’ve enabled the feature, you can also customize the voice used for the announcement. Here’s how.
- In the same menu, click on ‘Customize voiceâ??¦’
- Click on the “Voice” drop-down list.
- You will see the installed voices that you can choose from. Select one from these. Or, you can click “Customize”.
- 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 Turn Off Your Mac at Night
If you’re like me, you probably leave your Mac on all day. However, with this feature, you will end up getting hourly announcements even at night when you are sleeping. Luckily, there’s an easy fix thanks to awesome Mac apps like Keyboard Maestro.
- Open the Maestro keyboard (Download) and select ‘Global Macro Group’ from the sidebar.
- Click 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 list.
- Set the time you want the trigger to be activated. For example, I set the time to 10 p.m. You can also choose the days you want the automation to run.
- Click on ‘New action’.
- Select ‘System Actions’ from the categories and double-click ‘Toggle System Sound Mute’ to add it to your automation.
That’s it, the automation will run at 10pm on the days you selected and will mute your Mac. So you won’t be disturbed by hourly announcements when you’re in bed.
Use Time Announcements in Mac to Keep Track of Your Day
Automatic time announcements are a great way to keep track of your day. It’s also the best way for me to remind myself to make lunch on time – something I tend to forget often until I’m really hungry. So, do you use weather announcements in macOS Big Sur? Let us know in the comments. Also, if you have any questions, let us know and we’ll try to help.
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