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Text-To-Speech :
Sounds play a big part of X10Dispatcher. Sounds are the major component of
X10Dispatcher which transfers your computers functionality from : 'what can my computer/x10
do when i'm sitting in front of it', to 'what is my computer/x10 doing while i am
not using it'. Wavs can play a big part of that, but unless you record or
generate some 'canned phrases' yourself you are stuck using the humorous type wav
files which may or may not provide a good 'theme' for your automation.
To customize X10Dispatcher's sounds further, you have two options :
- Using a commercial grade text-to-speech utility like
this free one
(you would simply generate and play the wav file into windows
media player and then choose File/Save Media As.. to save to a wav file).
- You can use X10Dispatcher's built in Text-To-Speech capabilites to generate speech
dynamically.
Although you can mix-and-match sounds/commercial speech wavs/and X10Dispatcher's
text-to-speech capabilities, the built in Text-To-Speech capabilities offer several
advantages. It is easier to set and change text to speech messages than to
generate the wav files from third party speech tools. Also, several features
of X10Dispatcher convey dynamic information such as verbal web alerts, verbal email
announcement, invoking speech messages via MSN, and date/time announcement.
All those features will speak text which changes all the time and can't be manually
generated and saved as a wav file.
The text-to-speech functionality in X10 Dispatcher utilizes a speech engine known
as SAPI5. Some third party speech engines may support SAPI5 and provide you
with extra 'voices' which appear in the dropdown on the sounds tab of the options
screen. If you use those voices then you are using their text to speech engines.
By default most users will only have 'Sam' voice which ships with Windows XP.
That voice is sufficient but it relatively low quality. You may install several
other voices by installing the speech sdk
here. Also if you have newer versions of Microsoft Office installed,
you may have some higher quality Lernout & Hauspie voices. These are designated
by an LH in front of the voice name. If you see those, you should choose them over
the lower quality versions.
If you are running Windows 2000, then you may only have SAPI4 functionality installed
and you may not see any voices. If that is the case try downloading the SDK
from the link above. That should install all necessary files.