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SDsolar
Asked: 2017-11-18 18:20:50 +0800 CST

16.04 LTS How to make the system announce the time at the top of the hour with eSpeak

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Past versions of Ubuntu had speech built in.

Searching in Unity I can't find anything with the words "speak" nor "speech" that are relevant for TTS

My plan is to have cron jobs speak so I can leave the monitor shut off.

Beginning with having it do a time announcement each hour. It is OK if it is not perfectly precise to the second.

So how can I make 16.04 LTS speak?

16.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For my project, cron jobs that can talk, espeak is the simplest.

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install espeak

    It can announce the time with /home/me/scripts/saytime:

    #!/bin/bash
echo "\`$(date +%H)\` Hundred" | espeak

    Then set it into crontab like so:

    export EDITOR=gedit
crontab -e

    ...add this line:

    00 * * * * /home/me/scripts/saytime

    For more details about espeak itself:

    How to text-to-speech output using command-line?

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  2. You may need to initialize sound in crontab temporary shell to get sound.

    So you can initialize sound in crontab or at least in script that is called from crontab.

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