Smart Home Automation with Linux- P7

Smart Home Automation with Linux- P7:For every word I’ve written, five have been discarded. Such is the nature of writing. For every tenprograms I’ve downloaded, tried, and tested, nine have been discarded. Such is the nature of software.Finding a perspicuous overlap has been a long and arduous tasks, and one that I’d wish for no one tosuffer in solitude.
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Smart Home Automation with Linux- P7 CHAPTER 5 ■ COMMUNICATION You now have an alternate voice that, if installed correctly, can be proven with the Festivalcommand (voice.list) (with the brackets). It should now show us1_mbrola as a suitable voice, so youcan test it with the following:say us1_mbrola Hello automation When you’re happy you’ve found a voice you like, you can make it the default by setting VOX in theprevious script:VOX=(voice_us1_mbrola) Having access to separate voices is good since people respond differently to different voices,according to the situation. The female voice, psychologists tell us, is good for information, issuing help,and reporting text, while humans respond better to commands given by a male voice. Within ahousehold, you might have messages intended for different people spoken with different voices. If thelistener knows the voice that’s theirs, it’s possible (through a auditory quirk known as the cocktail partyeffect) for them to isolate their voice among a lot of other auxiliary noise, including other spokencommands. The default voice (usually kal_diphone or ked_diphone) is raspy enough that it works well as the finalalarm call of the morning. However, ensure that guests know you’re using it, because being woken up bysomething that’s the cross between Stephen Hawking and a Dalek is quite disconcerting. As well as simple phrases, you can ask Festival to read files to you either through the following:say default `cat filename`or through the following, which is more elegant:festival --tts filename Although only text files are directly supported, there are a number of tools such as html2txt (can beused in conjunction with pdftohtml) to allow most documents to be read to you, maybe as part of youralarm call or while you’re cooking dinner and unable to read from a screen.■ Note Try to keep vocal utterances as short as possible, splitting longer phrases up into separate calls toFestival, since long paragraphs often cause the voice to slow down and become unintelligible. It is also possible to build your own voices for Festival. Although the process is too involved andcomplex to discuss here, details are available through Carnegie Mellon’s FestVox project(http://festvox.org). If you want a custom voice, it’s easier to record one as an audio sample. 163 CHAPTER 5 ■ COMMUNICATION ■ Note Naturally, there are also commercial speech synthesis packages available, which is something that most open source devotees forget. One such example is available from http://cepstral.com whose web site also provides dynamic example voices. Piecemeal Samples Most automated train announcements are comprised of individual vocal snippets that are then rearranged into order by a computer. This provides a great range of possible phrases using a comparatively small set of original samples. With careful trimming of the sound files, they can sound very humanistic. The problem with this approach is that it is impossible to introduce hitherto unknown phrases into its lexicon. If you are using a human voice as an alarm clock, for example, you will know in advance every phrase and part-phrase that could be uttered. In the case of error reports from a software package, you probably won’t, particularly when it comes to filenames and user input. In these cases, you will probably have to acknowledge when the samples don’t exist and revert to Festival. To create a vocal alarm clock, for example, you first need to consider the samples you will need. This can be as expansive as you’re prepared to record for. Many countries have their own speaking clock service, accessible by telephone, that quote the time in ten-second intervals with many recording an entire 24-hour clock with each specific phrase. You also need to consider how grammatically exact you’d like to be. Does the phrase “1 seconds” annoy you? If so, you’ll need a specific sample for that. You also need to consider personal preferences, such as whether “15 minutes past” sounds better to your ears than “a quarter past,” and so on. Personally, I have a list of standard clock phrases that I consider important: • “the time is” • “p.m.” • “a.m.” • “midnight” • “o’clock” • “a quarter past” • “half past” • “a quarter to” All the other times can be comprised of the following phrases: • “minutes past” • “minutes to” • “past” ...