[Dapper] Best way to access speech?

[Nils Kassube]

On Friday 13 April 2007 10:51, Brian Fahrlander wrote:
> Peter Garrett wrote:
> > On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:32:37 -0500
> >
> >>     Has anyone done something like this?
> >
> > Try something like this:
> >
> > echo "Take your pills" | festival --tts
> >
> > Or put something in a file:
> >
> > echo "take your pills" >> pill-reminder
> >
> > cat pill-reminder | festival --tts
> >
> > For a one-off reminder, use the "at" command
> >
> > at 4 pm <enter>
> > at> cat pill-reminder | festival --tts <enter>
> > at> <EOT>
> >  ( ctrl +D on a separate line)
> >
> > You could put this in a cron job that calls the command as a script,
> > I guess ( I haven't tried it, but you get the idea I hope)
> >
> > You can try
> >
> > date | festival --tts
> >
> > for the time - but it isn't very clear here :) Someone will no doubt
> > have a better way to do this ...
>
>     Not a problem; date +%H, etc will make that happen.  I'm not sure
> why this wasn't so clear from the docs I was using- I couldn't care
> less about voices, inflections and the like until IT STARTS WORKING, ya
> know?
>
>     (Now that it is, is there any way to make it louder?)

Yes, there is - amixer will do the job. With the command

amixer -c <cardnum> contents

you get a listing of available controls for your sound card. <cardnum> is 
the number of your sound card which is 0 if you have only one. From the 
displayed list select the control you want to modify. E.g. my sound card 
has this entry:

numid=3,iface=MIXER,name='Headphone Playback Volume'
  ; type=INTEGER,access=rw---,values=2,min=0,max=64,step=0
  : values=40,40

In the second line you can read the min. and max. control values, from the 
third line you can read the current values if you want to restore them 
later. Using the numid of the first line as a reference for the control I 
set the max. volume with this command:

amixer -c <cardnum> cset numid=3 64,64


Nils