Background/Basics

This blog is as much for me to keep track of what/how I've done things with text to speech on the Raspberry Pi as it is for people to follow my progress.

So far, the project is split into three main files.

#1 - my program, written in C.

#2 - a shell script that sends the text I want turned into speech to Google Translate (This script here, by Dan Fountain)

#3 - a simple script which downloads the five day forecast for Leicester from the Met Office site.

What the main program does:
-Says "Good morning Tom, the time is 6:20am" at 6:20am.

-Reads in the weather data for Leicester from the Met Office API, finds the current day's weather and announces the type of weather (sunny, light showers, overcast, heavy snow, etc.), maximum temperature and the wind direction.

What I'm aiming to have it do soon:

-Announce the wind speed and chance of rain.  I might also throw in the visibility.

-Announce the top three stories from the BBC (this looks like it'll be significantly more complex than the weather data, based on the size of the xml document produced).

Long term goals:

-Possibly add in speech recognition, maybe using Voice Command by Steven Hickson or something much like it (using Google Voice to convert the speech to txt).

-Set up a webcam and Motion to detect if people enter the room and say different things, either based on the time of day or facial recognition.

Please bear in mind that what I have so far is largely tailored for my specific needs, and while it should be customisable to an extent in its current state, a lot of work would need to be done to make it a) more user friendly and b) work for everyone. 

It is my hope that, even if what I have doesn't work for you, I will give you the basics that you need to get your own version working.