I have reached a point where I almost have status updates ready to be announced verbally by LMCE.
Instead of my wake-up event saying "Good Morning, Jeremy", I am working on getting "Good Morning Jeremy, it is Saturday, September 01. Outside temperature is 80 high today is 86."
I would like climate section orbiter scenes that when pressed state "current temperature is 81, wind speed 5 from southwest, no active alerts"
1001 other ideas I could type here, but I have an issue and need some help from another user to get this working.
What I have =
Several small scripts that can pull current conditions either from the internet for weather, yahoo headlines, etc. I also have scripts that can pull information from local resources such as state, current time/date or other background programs. This information is pulled and written to a temp text file. From command line I can run these scripts and have festival or espeak read back the text file in the format I want to hear it in. My current work is trying to combine these into one large script that depending on what conditions are used will output different information. Because the text to be read is pulled from one reused text file everything stays clean and there is no need to add a rm line.
Roadblock =
Text to Speech template in LMCE only accepts 'quoted' statements. There is no way to get a path/to/file.txt into the event/statement area.
What I need =
Someone good with web-admin/template creation to rewrite or create a new Text to Speech template that accepts path. The command to run my scripts can exist in the event so this new template does not need to include 'run script', in fact it would be best left with path to text so that it stays clean. Moving statements from other existing events to path would be easy. Create a location called ~/spoken that can house all the tts statements as separate .txt files, my constantly updated current_conditions.txt will be just one of them.
How to collaborate=
Your template to me: via instructions to create. I do not believe anything will need to be written to make a template capable of reading from a path so just explain how you created it. If there are issues that require you to write something then we can use sharing methods described below.
My scripts to you: A few of these require adding weather-utils which is in the repository so there is nothing special other than an apt-get install needed. My scripts are really simple bash commands made executable. They can be sent as text via email, personal message etc. When you get them of course look them over to see what I am calling and how I am filtering content to be spoken. Once you know I didn't just doomsday you, you execute a gcc command to compile and another command (sorry I forget atm) to make it executable.
When it is clean and we are satisfied I will get permission to upload to sqlCVS and others will be able to use this function as well. Pat yourself on the back at this point and call yourself a semi-dev! Honestly I get frustrated with 'almost' getting things working under LMCE and think this is a good way to use what I know so far without several more weeks of template/GSD research.
Message me if you are interested in helping and be sure to include any unique things you would like announced. Be creative, it can be done! Stock listing, tv schedule, NASCAR standings, Douglas Adams ebook, personal and work emails, calendar appointments...
Final Notes:
I will be supporting this, meaning if it breaks I am the one who has to redo my scripts. If the format or language of the source data changes it would likely output gibberish. I would then need to change the way I pull your information for tts and resend it to you.
I am a Portal fan so wherever possible I am trying to make my announcements shift pitch etc to sound like GLaDOS. To do this I need to either create a new voice for festival or do some creative work with recurring statements within my announcements and lay them out as regular audio files to overlay announcements. It's gonna be tricky but if I can get around some hurdles it would be amazing!
Future add-ons for this: My HA theme is Portal/Max Headrom/LawnMowerMan(movie not book) inspired so to complete and compliment these announcements I hope to one-day to add video so that my home has a face and AI personality. For a robotic persona I can fire a mpeg to on-screen orbiter of GLaDOS moving about while the announcements play, for a more human/cyborg persona I am going to have to come up with a way to mimic mouth movements and that is not going to be written this year...
