I've generally shied away from utilizing OS X's text-to-speech functions in the past, because even 'Alex' sounded jarringly artificial to me.

If your bandwidth or hard drive space are limited, I wouldn't recommend downloading more than a few of these voices. You'll find this alert welcome, because these high-quality voice files are huge, generally in the neighborhood of 350 to 500 MB each. Selecting a checkbox next to a voice and clicking 'OK' will present an alert asking if you're sure you want to download the voice. In particular, the Australian English 'Lee' voice (now my default) and Mexican Spanish 'Javier' sound incredibly lifelike to my ears. (You can also listen to previews of these voices at NextUp.) Most of these new voices sound astonishingly natural, especially compared to the old, robotic, pre-Alex voices that were the bread and butter of text-to-speech in OS X's distant past. Clicking on 'Customize' gives you access to the plethora of new optional voices, and you can play previews of each one before downloading them. This will likely be set to 'Alex' by default. In the Speech pane of System Preferences, clicking on the Text to Speech tab gives you an option for 'System Voice' in a pulldown menu. It's also a bit of a misnomer to say they're 'included' with OS X, as they are not included in the standard Lion install and require a separate download. Like a few other features of OS X Lion, Apple hasn't made these new voices easily discoverable unless you know where to look for them. Text-to-speech voices are now available in Arabic, three different Chinese dialects, Czech, Danish, two varieties of Dutch, Finnish, two French dialects, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, two Portuguese dialects, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, two Spanish dialects, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. These new voices, sourced from Nuance, are not only available in several dialects of English but also, in an OS X first, in several other languages. While Alex was a breakthrough for text-to-speech Mac voices at the time, the over 50 new voices included in Lion outmatch him in several key ways.

The last major addition to Apple's built-in OS X voices was Alex, a higher-quality voice included in Mac OS X Leopard back in 2007. First announced in March, then found in developer previews, one of the little-heralded new features of OS X Lion is its inclusion of several high-quality text-to-speech voices in 22 different languages.

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