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    Length of text announcement?

    Hello again,
    I am just playing around with AirSpeak and enjoy the process immensely. In doing so, I created an event that turns on my receiver, changes output to AppleTV, then speaks the phrase specifically directed just at that client (i.e. AppleTV). After playing around with this event and finding the right delay times for everything (i.e. time it takes for receiver to power up, switch source, etc.), everything is working as expected. Very happy.

    Next, I went and added another long sentence to the "speak" parameter in the event. This is when I found out that the speech stops at the same spot, each and every time. Nothing after that spot is read.

    I thought that, perhaps, that was a limitation in the number of characters entered in that "speak something" field in HS3. So, since there is an option to read the contents of a file, I just checked that, created a text document with the contents I previously tried to play, saved it, and pointed the action of the event to that file.

    Same thing! The file was read, but the speaking stopped at exact same spot! Does anyone know why? Am I limited by a specific number of characters / words/ time that the speech takes place? What is that limiting factor?

    #2
    Well, just to test things, I created an event that speaks the same amount of words / characters, but locally, not to the AirPlay-connected speakers. The entire contents of that event was spoken out, as intended. Unlike in my failed test with AirplaySpeak, the speech was not interrupted after a certain number of characters. So this is not a HomeSeer limitation...

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      #3
      could you send me the text you are trying to speak, and tell me where it stops, so that I can try to replicate the same thing.

      thanks

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        #4
        Originally posted by spud View Post
        could you send me the text you are trying to speak, and tell me where it stops, so that I can try to replicate the same thing.

        thanks
        Spud,
        I figured it out last night. The cause is so stupid, it eluded me. I could not figure out why, as I change the phrase, the speech stops after a different number of spoken words / characters every time. Since I had the event wake up the receiver for the announcement, at the end of that announcement, I also placed two commands: switch to the our typically used input after the announcement, then shut off the receiver.

        Well, when played just locally, not to one of the AirplaySpeak clients, there was no equivalent of shutting down the receiver, right? So it seems that, regardless of how long the spoken text is, and completely disregarding the option to wait for speech to finish, HS would send the command to shut the receiver down right after sending the speech command! I figured this out when, in a process of ruling out various causes, I deleted every instruction in my test event that followed the "speak something" command. As soon as I did that, the entire text was spoken just fine!

        So, the solution is to add a "Wait" command right after "Speak Something command", making sure that the wait was longer than the speech would take. Not a difficult solution by any means. I already added a bunch of "wait" pauses into this event, to allow for receiver to switch states, change volume, etc. It is just silly that one has to do this. No biggie, though. Here's a screen capture of the final test event layout:

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