The Speech plugin

Author: Tobias Bräutigam

Available since: 0.10.0

Description

Use the Web Speech API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Speech_API) to make text-to-speech service available. This plugin listens to a address and forwards the incoming data to the browser TTS engine (if the browser supports it)

Simple example

<speech lang="en">
 <address transform="OH:string" mode="read">Speak</address>
</speech>

Example preventing repetition within a timeout and use mapping

...
<meta>
 <plugins>
   <plugin name="speech" />
 </plugins>
 <mappings>
   <mapping name="speak">
     <entry value="0">Hello, welcome home</entry>
     <entry value="1">Please close all windows</entry>
     <entry value="2">Please close all doors</entry>
   </mapping>
 </mappings>
</meta>
...
<speech lang="en" repeat-timout="300" mapping="speak">
 <address transform="DPT:5.010" mode="read">Speak</address>
</speech>

Settings

For a general understanding of how the configuration files are structured and what elements and attributes are it is recommended to read this section first: Pages and structure of CometVisu.

The behaviour and appearance of the speech plugins can be influenced by using certain attributes and elements. The following tables show the allowed attributes and elements and their possible values. The screenshots show, how both can be edited in the editor.

Attributes underlined by ….. are mandatory, all the others are optional and be omitted.

Allowed attributes in the speech-element

Element	Attribute
	Name	Content	Description
speech	lang	de, en, es, fr, it or ru	The language that should be used to speak the text.
	mapping	string	Map the bus value to a message for text-to-speech output. You can e.g. map numbers to messages.
	repeat-timeout	number > 0	Do not repeat saying the same content within the given timeout (in seconds). 0 means: never repeat the same content.

Attributes in the editor (simple view) [1]

Allowed child-elements and their attributes

Element	Attribute
Structure	Name	Content	Description
speech address	transform	string	Transformation of the bus system value to be shown.
	mode	disable, read, write or readwrite	“disable” deactivates the communication, “read” will only fetch data from the backend, “write” will only write to it and an address with “readwrite” will be both, read from and written to.
	variant	string
	format-pos	decimal	Position for format string when multiple addresses are used.
	selector	string	Only MQTT: JSON selector
	qos	decimal	Only MQTT: QoS
	retain	true or false	Only MQTT: retain flag
	ignore-error	true or false	Only MQTT: ignore decode errors.
speech address #text		string	The GA (like: 12/0/7) for KNX-backends, the item name for openHAB-backend or the MQTT topic

Elements in the editor

Examples

It is possible to manually edit the visu_config.xml and add an entry for the speech plugin.

Caution

Make sure that you only use UTF-8 encoded characters by settings the encoding in your XML-editor to UTF-8 mode!

Footnotes

[1]

The simple view might not show everything. To see all elements/attributes use the expert view.