How do you get an hourly talking clock?

Question

I want to get a program (a script that can be set to auto-start or something) that tells you every hour like "It's 11 o'clock."

I know it's easy on Macs, but how do you get that on Precise?

Jez W · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-22T11:40:18.130

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There's a program in the standard repos for it, saytime.

sudo apt-get install saytime

Then you can run saytime -r 3600 to run it every hour (3600 seconds, or change the number for a different interval in seconds). It will start as a background process when run with this option.

If you want to change the format (for example to remove the "and X seconds") it would be saytime -r 3600 -f %P%l%M - full format options in man saytime.

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=516600&p=3130400#post3130400

edited May 22 '13 at 11:40

answered May 15 '13 at 15:11

Jez W

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@Dan Wow. Whoops. Good spot, that's rather an embarrassing one! Yes, it was indeed meant to be 3600. Edited to fix. – Jez W May 22 '13 at 11:20
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If you have problems like `sox FAIL formats: can't open output file '/dev/audio': Permission denied` run it with `padsp`: `$ padsp saytime -r 3600` – franzlorenzon Jun 17 '13 at 07:19
@franzlorenzon How do you make `padsp saytime -r 3600` work from Startup Applications in Gnome? I tried adding it there but it doesn't work. – Tracy Iquiña Jul 18 '13 at 10:13
Does it work one the terminal? Can you see the log from Gnome (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/17244/where-is-log-file-of-gnome-3)? – franzlorenzon Jul 18 '13 at 11:14
How can I use this to run at starting of every hour like 1 o' clock, 2 o' clock, etc...? – Deepam Gupta Aug 04 '21 at 09:14

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 17 '13 at 07:06

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sudo apt-get install festival

If you wanna get crazy you can also add to gnome-schedule:

echo This is my custom message | festival --tts

Where custom message can include the output of the command

date

and if you want a nicer voice try something like:

sudo apt-get install festvox-us1
echo "(set! voice_default 'voice_us1_mbrola)" | sudo tee -a /etc/festival.scm

edited Jun 17 '13 at 07:06

Community

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answered Jun 06 '13 at 09:24

Jonathan

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I think you should use cron too to make it run every hour. – franzlorenzon Jun 17 '13 at 07:21
That's what I meant by gnome-schedule – Jonathan Jun 20 '13 at 10:27
Ops, you're right :) – franzlorenzon Jun 20 '13 at 11:31

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 18 '15 at 15:50

0

The current espeak version (1.48.3) links directly to mbrola voices. So you can obtain a good result with something like:

date|espeak -v en-us

Parms are available to espeak to tweak the voice. See it's man for more options.

answered Nov 18 '15 at 15:50

Hydra Starmaster

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How do you get an hourly talking clock?

3 Answers3