Praat
Praat is a macOS speech analysis and phonetics app used to record, annotate, measure, synthesize, and edit speech and other sound.
What is Praat?
Praat is a macOS music-audio app for phonetics, speech science, and acoustic analysis. It helps students, researchers, teachers, and linguists record sounds, inspect waveforms and spectrograms, measure pitch, formants, intensity, jitter, and shimmer, and annotate recordings with TextGrids. The app is widely used for speech segmentation, transcription support, pronunciation study, voice research, and classroom demonstrations. It also includes tools for speech synthesis, sound manipulation, picture generation for papers or teaching materials, and scripting for repeatable analysis workflows. Praat is published by Paul Boersma and is available for macOS as a native desktop application.
Key features
- Analyze speech with spectrogram, pitch, formant, and intensity tools
- Annotate recordings with multi-tier TextGrid labels and time points
- Record, open, edit, and manipulate sound files for research and teaching
- Measure voice characteristics such as jitter, shimmer, and voice breaks
- Synthesize speech and experiment with articulatory and acoustic models
- Create publication-ready figures and diagrams from acoustic data
- Automate repetitive analysis tasks with built-in scripting
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Safety overview
Status: Safe
Praat is legitimate research and teaching software for speech and phonetics work. Access to audio files and microphone input is normal if you use it to record or analyze sound. It does not need unusual system privileges for ordinary use. As with any app that handles recordings and annotations, keep backups of important project files before major edits or batch processing.
Recommendation: Keep Praat if you study, teach, or work with speech, linguistics, or acoustic analysis on your Mac. If you no longer use it, you can remove the app and any related support files to free space, but save any recordings, TextGrids, scripts, or exported figures you want to keep first.
Common paths
/Applications/Praat.app
Preference paths
~/Library/Preferences/org.praat.Praat.plist
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