bjoernvold.com

Well I like the occasional prank...So it has been a dream of mine to SSH into my homebox when I am away and make the computer speak...

So I installed festival from the repos and happily danced away to my terminal.
Then I wrote my first message to be spoken:

and...
Nothing

Ok so I needed a language file too - I found and installed festival-english
Now it should be OK

...and got

Ah back to the drawing board then.

It turns out that only people with a working text to speech server get it to work right out of the box so here is what I had to do:

Find
/usr/share/festival/festival.scm and edit it and put these lines at the very bottom:


Code: Select all

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Required_Format 'aiff)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "paplay $FILE --client-name=Festival --stream-name=Speech")

This is for people with pulseaudio - like me.
ALSA people can have a look here:


If you use ALSA you need to add these lines instead:

Code: Select all
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)
(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r $SR $FILE")

So I happily type

...and


SUCCESS!

My speakers announced the message

PS: on some distros the file to edit might be ~/.festivalrc

The syntax is easy

echo "whatever you want to say" | festival --tts

PS on Mageia a simple
will take care of everything for you.
Install it at you are good to go with this:


In Centos it is even simpler:

No questions asked, and it comes with a sexy female voice

In Debian 8 everything works right out of the box after a:

It looks like my trouble shooting above is mostly for Arch based distros.

One word of warning,

Be careful with these pranks! I tested it and it scared the living daylights out of her. She was convinced she was hacked and pulled the plug which naturally broke off my ssh connection.
And was in general paranoid after that.

Me laughing, did not help much either so I am only alive due to my robust Berserk nature - trying to spare my fellow Berserks the same suffering....

It sounds much better than this on the computer but I guess I lost some quality in converting it to mp3

Not practical you say?
Well here is one example why you absolutely need this:

Since you are loaded and need to keep track of currencies worldwide you can get the currency in a terminal.
To get the daily course add this at the end of your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

Reload bash with

Now you can go to a terminal and type

This will convert 1 usd to eur
You can convert mostly any currency from the first to the second like this. And that is great but naturally you need your computer to read the values to you too so replace the code above with this one:

Type
currency 1 usd eur
And the computer will read the values to you before they are printed in the terminal. You can take any currency like currency 1 usd nok which will convert one USD to NOK or currency 1 nok eur and so on...
The currencies are updated in real time (I suspect there might be a small delay in comparison to the paid services - depending on how fast Google get the data, which I suspect is pretty fast) and based on non free services that Google do provide for us. The sources for these are mainly Reuters and EBS.
It will look like this in the terminal

And you will hear it too.
Time to admit it: You will never be able to live without that