This is nothing advanced, but it’s funny and most people are impressed if you show it to them.
- invoke Quicksilver
- hit “.” and enter some text in the first pane
- change to the second pane and select “Speak text (say)”
- listen to the voice saying what you typed
If you don’t like the voice change it in your Mac OS X System Preferences -> Speech (preferabely you go there using Quicksilver by invoking it and typing “speech” in the first pane).
A possible use of this besides the fun is a spoken reminder. To let QS speak something to you at a certain time or after a certain amout of time you need to make this a timed event. Do the above steps 1-3, but don’t press return, instead press CTRL-Return. Now choose “run after delay” or “run at time” and enter something like “10min” or “10:20pm”.
Of course the last trick works with all other kinds of actions too. Maybe quitting iTunes at 12pm (music stops, time to go to bed 
). Feel free to use the comments if you have any questions or other ideas on how to make use of this.
May 21, 2009 at 12:26 pm
thanks for the post, but this doesn’t work for me. there is no action “speak text”. do i have to install a special plugin for this?
November 18, 2010 at 10:26 am
Thank you for the article, but like Murray I cannot find the action.
I typed “say” (without the quotes) before the text I wanted spoken and ran it though the action “Run command in shell” as a workaround.
November 18, 2010 at 4:46 pm
You have to enable the Action in the Quicksilver preferences, The Action is called “Speak Text (Say)”.