Is say, macOS has a wonderful command line utility which I found to be useful to use in conjuction with long-running processes or even debugging to help draw attention, more so that typical beeping would do.

In short, say speaks text - is a Text-to-Speech (TTS) program.

say "Hello, there"

I wanted something similar on Windows and while there’s no direct equivalent, luckily .NET provides an entire host of utilities through the System.Speech.Synthesis namespace.

The say command has a number of parameter, mostly dealing with technical attributes such as voice selection (the speaker), output of spoken text, quality, e.t.c.

For this example, we’ll stick with the default voice of the speech synthesizer. As such, the solution is really simple using a Powershell script:

[cmdletbinding()]
param(
    [Parameter(Position = 1, Mandatory = $true)]
    [String]
    $message
)
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Speech
$synth = New-Object -TypeName System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
$synth.Speak($message)

The Position-al parameter binding allow us to either call it directly:

say.ps1 'Hello there'

Or pass is with a switch argument:

say.ps1 -message 'Hello there'

I wish Visual Studio still had the ability to call macros on breakpoint because the code could translate into a one-liner in C#:

new System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer()
  .Speak("Breakpoint hit");

As such, one would have to wrap it first into a method that can then get called when a breakpoint is hit.

It would be interesting to replicate the rest of the commands, in particular the voices since that would also allow for proper I18N speech synthesis.