Conference hydra::amiga_v1

       I tried this last night while proof reading a memo I was working
       on and found that it was almost as good as having someone else
       review it for mistakes!  When I heard it being read, missing
       words, misspelt words and poor grammer became fairly obvious.
       The default voice could use a bit of work by changing some of the
       parameters, but other then that I can see where this may be of
       some value.

       Another problem that I have (and I'm sure I'm not alone on this
       one) is loosing track of time!  Using a 2 liner, I created
       another process to keep me informed of events, other than those
       associated with the AMIGA, that I should be paying attention to.
       At a CLI prompt I typed in:

       run wait until 21:00+
       say time to kiss the wife and kids goodnight

       Sure enough, while typing like mad, I got reminded to perform my  
       husbandly/fatherly duty.

       The applications are endless:

       "hill street blues starts in 10 minute"
       "its 3 a m get to bed stupid"
       "let the dog out"
       "let the dog in"
       
       By starting up a bunch of newcli's you could have it nagging you
       all night long!  What a great tool at work in keeping track of
       appointments - let's see you do that with a Rainbow!
       
       I know I could run the CLOCK, but being spoken to is a whole lot
       nicer than being BEEPED!
       
       I never cease to be amazed at what can be done with the AMIGA with
       so little effort.


       Art

       
       P.S. This is so simple that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD probably knew
       about it but me.  But just in case there is anyone out there who
       just plugged in their AMIGA this morning - for the first time, you
       may have found the above of interest. 

    I agree with you:  I can't believe that this has been sitting on
    my Amiga all this time, waiting to be discovered.  I have been looking
    around for a program that would allow me to 'speak' text files,
    for proof reading, but haven't seen anything.  Alas, I had it all
    along.
    
    It would be nice if C/A would document some of these capabilities
    a little better.  Now if I could just get it to say "Stop Moaning"
    the next time I get a Guru Meditation error....
    
    Randy
    

    Caution: Use it only with ASCII text files that DO NOT contain any
    word processing formatting commands. Some the the control codes
    appear to alter volume, speed, pitch, etc. I accidently tried it
    on a Scribble file and found that the voice was switching from robot
    to natural, high to low volume, etc.

    Yeah, I ran into the same thing when I tried to use a Textcraft
    file, without saving it as text only.
    
    If you want to hear some really strange sounds, try a disk access
    while the Amiga is talking to you.  The voice gets top priority.
    The drive does all the singing.
    
    Of course, if you type RUN SAY -X dir:filename, this will allow
    you to multi-task.
    

    Help!  I'm having problems using the SAY command the way everybody
    suggests in this topic.  When I type:
                            SAY -X S:ONE-HOUR-WARNING.TXT
    my Amiga speaks the name of my file, not the contents.  What am
    I doing wrong?  Also, how do I invoke the command in the file
    STARTUP-SEQUENCE so that the file is spoken in one hour's time?
    Thanks ahead of time......

    Hi,

    re.5,

    >Help!  I'm having problems using the SAY command the way everybody
    >suggests in this topic.  When I type:
    >                        SAY -X S:ONE-HOUR-WARNING.TXT
    >my Amiga speaks the name of my file, not the contents.  What am
    >I doing wrong?

    I am having exactly the same trouble and I've been getting a bit
    frustrated about it.

    Help.

    Thanks in advance,

    Colin.

    Well S: is not a device old chap. Try S/ as in DF0:S/

Are you _SURE_ s: is not a device??  I certainly thought it was.  The
execute command ends up looking in s: for sequence files if it doesn't
find them elsewhere doesn't it??

    As I am typing... I have my Amiga talking a blue streak in the
    background. S: is a 'logical' that you can assign. You might want
    to check what that assignment is by using the 'ASSIGN LIST' command.
    Another thought is that your file name has a couple of hyphens in
    it. That might have confused the command line parser...
    
    Also, check to see that this is the version of SAY that came with
    V1.2 of the DOS. I think there were some differences between the
    two versions of SAY.
    
    Regards,
    =jbf=

    I tried the command after eliminating the hyphens and it still doesn't
    work.  The S: logical seems to work OK when I edit STARTUP-SEQUENCE
    so I'm not sure what the problem is.  I even set my default into
    the S: directory to eliminate any confusion about location and the SAY 
    command still wouldn't work.

    SAY -X DF0:S/STARTUP-SEQUENCE (etc.) works fine for me. It's an A500
    with K/S version 33.180 and WB version 33.56.  What gives??
    
    BTW, Does anyone know of a program or command procedure that I can
    "run" that would announce the time every 15 or 30 minutes? I've
    got an amazing ability to lose all track of time :')
    
    bw
    

    SAY -X DF0:S/START-SEQUENCE doesn't work on my 1000.  BTW, I am
    running WB 1.2 and the SAY command is in the SYSTEM: directory.
    I'm going to solve this problem someday, one way or another.

    If it's in the system directory, don't you type:
    
    DF0:SYSTEM/SAY -X DF0:S/STARTUP-SEQUENCE   ?
       
    

    Better yet, make sure the Startup-Sequence includes the statement:
    
    if EXISTS SYSTEM:
      PATH SYSTEM: ADD
    EndIf
    
    This will add the SYSTEM: directory to the current path, which by
    default is SYS: and C:
    
    Ed.
    

    I think I found the solution to my problem.  The command wouldn't
    work when I said 
    				say -x WARNING
    so I renamed the file to Warning and the command:
     				say -x Warning
    worked!

    Can somebody in the know give me a quick rundown on how to call
    up SAY with a CLI running in the background in order to announce
    that I've been on 1 hour, 2 hours, and give me "time to log off, you jerk" 
    messages.  Thanks in advance.

    After reading up on my commands (which I should have done more
    thoroughly in the first place), I now know what my problem was.  When
    I use the SAY command the -x must be lowercase in order for the
    command to work correctly.  Many examples of the command show the
    x in the upper case, which led to my confusion.
    
    Now, another problem:
    I set up the following line in my Startup-sequence:
             Run Wait 60 mins+SAY -x s:Warning
    in order to have a background job yell at me in one hour, however,
    I get the message:
             Wait failed returncode 20
    when the sequence gets to that line.  Anybody know what I'm doing
    wrong here?

>             Run Wait 60 mins+SAY -x s:Warning

Maybe the +SAY -x... stuff si being passed to WAIT as parameters, and it
doesn't like it.

John

    Nah, I get that message just by typing "RUN WAIT 9 SECS" with nothing
    following the command.

Re: .18

The following works for me:

run wait 5 secs +
say "hello"

Note that the + must be followed by a newline.

    My daughter just go an Amiga 500 and we recently tried the SAY
    functions...but could not get the voices to change. We tried
    the user's guide's instructions and all the permutations of
    the commands we could think of, but still just the 'robot'
    voice. 
    
    While this shortcoming does not really disturb her, as she views
    it as just a 'cute' feature, I am wondering if it might indicate
    a hardware (or software) problem.
    
    Has anyone else out there had similar troubles? Any advice or
    recommendations?
    
    Thanks!
    
    John B.

I may be wrong, but I have a vague recollection that the commands are case
sensitive (a bug), so try all the variations of caps and lower case letters.

Dave

    
    
    Also try changing the pitch after setting the type of voice ..eg
    
    say -m -p150 -x filename
    
    I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the change in voice doesn't
    happen untill the pitch is changed. I think it's in the A500 manual
    that I got with workbench 1.2  .
    
    Steve

    Thanks to all who replied, both by Notes and Mail! Its working and
    we have some new ideas to try!! The lowercase 'bug' was probably
    our trouble!
    
    Thanks, again!
    John B.
    

    Pitch -p is different from robot vs natural. -r is robot -n is natural.