Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P37:Linux users can now control their homes remotely! Are you a Linux user who has ever wanted to turn on the lights in your house, or open and close the curtains, while away on holiday? Want to be able to play the same music in every room, controlled from your laptop or mobile phone? Do you want to do these things without an expensive off-the-shelf kit | CHAPTER 5 COMMUNICATION You now have an alternate voice that if installed correctly can be proven with the Festival command with the brackets . It should now show us1_mbrola as a suitable voice so you can 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 the previous 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 a household you might have messages intended for different people spoken with different voices. If the listener knows the voice that s theirs it s possible through a auditory quirk known as the cocktail party effect for them to isolate their voice among a lot of other auxiliary noise including other spoken commands. The default voice usually kal_diphone or ked_diphone is raspy enough that it works well as the final alarm call of the morning. However ensure that guests know you re using it because being woken up by something 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 be used in conjunction with pdftohtml to allow most documents to be read to you maybe as part of your alarm 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 to Festival since long paragraphs often cause the voice to slow down and become unintelligible. It is also possible to build
