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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.