How to change volume of "say" in AppleScript?

Here is a line from my AppleScript that speaks the selected text:

set this_say_Pid to do shell script "LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pbpaste -Prefer txt | say > /dev/null 2>&1 & echo $!"

I would like the speaking volume to be much lower. I would prefer not to accomplish this by decreasing my overall system volume.

I can successfully decrease the volume of say in Terminal with the following code:

say "[[volm 0.35]] This is a sentence"

But, when I insert [[volm 0.35]] in my do shell script string, the volume does not change.

Since you are piping the output of the pbpaste command directly to say command, then e.g. [[volm 0.35]] would need to be a part of what's on the clipboard as e.g. [[volm 0.35]] must precede the content of what was actually going to be said.

I'd try using the following in place of what you are using:

set howLoudAndWhatToSay to "[[volm 0.35]] \"" & (get the clipboard as string) & "\""

set this_say_Pid to do shell script "say " & howLoudAndWhatToSay & " > /dev/null 2>&1 & echo $!"

Update: If you want to stick with using pbpaste, then this example command should work:

set this_say_Pid to (do shell script "echo \"[[volm 0.35]] $(LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pbpaste -Prefer txt)\" | say > /dev/null 2>&1 & echo $!")

Note the primary differences between the command within the do shell script "..." command in your question and my answer.

• echo \"[[volm 0.35]] is added in front of LANG=... and note the space after ]].

• The LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pbpaste -Prefer txt is now enclosed in $(...) which is using Command Substitution to, in essence, concatenate what gets echoed to the pipe ahead of the say command.

• As well as a matching closing literal double-quote \", before the pipe to say, to go with the one in echo \"[[volm 0.35]]. It did work in limited testing without the use of the opening and closing double-quotes however it's probably better to encase it in the double-quotes to account for something the shell might try to unnecessarily expand.

That said, on my system using 0.35 for the value in [[volm 0.35]] didn't work well in that is was difficult to perceive the difference in volume from my normal setting. However using 0.3 in [[volm 0.3]] the difference was notable. (This is one of the reasons why I used "e.g. [[volm 0.35]]" in my opening sentence.)

Simply move the first double quote: ... "say [[volm 0.35]] This is a sentence"

In Terminal.app the quotes aren't required at all and say [[volm 0.35]] This is a sentence simply works.

In your code line you would have to prepend [[volm 0.35]] to the copied text.

In Terminal the following line would work:

cat <(echo [[volm 0.35]] ) <(LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pbpaste -Prefer txt) | say 

but I don't get this to work in your AppleScript line properly - probably I have to escape one or several items.