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

Question

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?

SDsolar · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-08T00:06:01.323

3

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:

edited Apr 08 '18 at 00:06

answered Nov 18 '17 at 02:20

SDsolar

Stop spamming links to your posts, please. – muru Nov 20 '17 at 18:24
@SDsolar I would suggest adding how you added the script to your crontab as well, that way it's a more complete answer. – Thomas Ward Nov 21 '17 at 15:15
Great idea. You can now see it above. – SDsolar Nov 21 '17 at 20:23

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 25 '20 at 16:18

0

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.

answered Jan 25 '20 at 16:18

pbies

2 Answers2