[dylan604]

we used to do similar with the Mac's ability to speak using the command 'say'. we'd ssh into a computer we knew someone to be sitting and have it 'say' something while using their name. at least, until one day, the 'say' app was not longer available!

[krazydad]

And if you used the -v option to set the voice to “whisper”, it was super creepy. say -v whisper “Get out of the house”

[dylan604]

Were you home schooled? ;-)

Saying that in a school lab wouldn't make much sense

[cuttysnark]

say -v cellos "droid"

Pretty sure this is how they generated the sound that was used for those commercials once upon a time.

[msarnoff]

Us too. And if the sound was off, we could just turn up the volume with `osascript` commands!

[dylan604]

Luckily, the internal speaker on the Macs were decent enough so you could do this even if there were no speakers connected.

By designating the voice, you could even have multiple "people" talking to the user. It got annoying quite quickly to be on the receiving end

[donatj]

I worked in an office in the early 2000s that was PC’s but we had a single shared Mac workstation we’d use for tasks like testing things in Safari. I sat right next to this workstation and every time someone would sit there I would ssh in and use `say` to make it say strange things like “help, I’m stuck in the computer”. It was one of those green G3 towers and it would come kind of creepily out of it’s internal speaker.

No one knew who was doing it until one day my friend was using it and I made too much of an inside joke that gave it away.