SAPI tags

[kideon]

This plugin is great! It installed easily, auto detected the apple TV and the response is immediate.

I'm running the trial and ran into something that will be a deal killer, it is not interpreting SAPI tags. For example:

&Hs.speak ("Five hundred milliseconds of silence <silence msec='500'/> just occurred")

Plays correctly on the windows speaker client but here the tag gets spelled out.. Is there a way to fix it? I can't justify spending the bucks on the plugin with that happening.

Hope this is fixable! Already got my scripts for the morning routine written out.

[spud]

The AirplaySpeak plugin and HomeSeer use different API for TTS. By default AirplaySpeak use the newest API which unfortunately is not compatible with the SAPI tags.

However you can try to add the following to the tts section of your AirplaySpeak.ini

[tts]
use_speaktofile=True

this will tell HomeSeer TTS engine to speak the text to a file that the AirplaySpeak plugin will read and play. This method is not the default because it is a bit slower and quality is not as good, but it will understand the SAPI tags.

Alternatively I could try to parse and manually implement the SAPI tags in a future version of the plugin, but this is more difficult. What SAPI tags would you absolutely need?

[kideon]

Yeah the manual parsing would probably be best. I was just using silence to interject pauses.

[spud]

ok I will try to add it
but have you tested use_speaktofile=True ?

[kideon]

Nah based on what you said it's not really worth it. If anything I would write a script at this point and put in specific wait functions. I'm using the HSTouch client on my android devices and it also does not recognize the silence tag.

Just trying to figure out how to use what I've got before buying additional hardware.

[spud]

in version 3.0.0.5 available here: http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=160136
I have added the possibility to use SAPI so that the SAPI tags are processed exactly like in the HomeSeer Speaker application.
Add the following line in the TTS section of your Config/AirplaySpeak.ini file

[tts]
use_sapi=True

then restart the plugin, SAPI tags as <silence msec='500'/> should now be processed.