Text to Speech Driver (Web Interface, Control4 App, Voice Messages & More)

[JSTRONG]

Yeah I think Shivam or someone else can explain whats going on there. 

[Shivam Paw]

1 hour ago, ERDrPC said:

I also have an issue but it has been there since the driver was installed. When choosing listen I can type a message and it plays in the kitchen.  The weather driver announces the weather every morning in the kitchen. However, in all other rooms, I choose listen and type in the message then it either plays over the kitchen speakers or doesn't play in the selected room at all. All other audio sources (sonos, cable boxes,) and audio from watch sources play in their respective rooms with no issue. 

Any ideas? 

It sounds like you need to look at the programming for when announcement is executed and also the announcement agent to see if it's selecting all the rooms

[South Africa C4 user]

I have been using this text to speech driver for the last year.  I have paid licenses for most (maybe all) of the third party text to speech drivers and this is definitely my favourite.

I received an e-mail today telling me that I have 30 days left on my GoogleCloud platform free trial. I am pretty sure that this relates to this driver and the  setup that was required to get it working when I first installed the driver 11 months ago. So a question for @Shivam Paw - do I need to upgrade to keep the text to speech working or will it just continue?

 

[Shivam Paw]

30 minutes ago, South Africa C4 user said:

I have been using this text to speech driver for the last year.  I have paid licenses for most (maybe all) of the third party text to speech drivers and this is definitely my favourite.

I received an e-mail today telling me that I have 30 days left on my GoogleCloud platform free trial. I am pretty sure that this relates to this driver and the  setup that was required to get it working when I first installed the driver 11 months ago. So a question for @Shivam Paw - do I need to upgrade to keep the text to speech working or will it just continue?

 

Erm..I sincerely hope it continues! If you’ve had yours for 11 months then I’ve had mine for at least 12 and it’s still running which is the good news. 

I haven’t been charged, but it may be that you do need to enter some payment details and it’s worth keeping an eye on it. The free tier should last forever and is very generous as far as I’m aware. 

[dw886]

On 6/3/2020 at 3:31 PM, Shivam Paw said:

Erm..I sincerely hope it continues! If you’ve had yours for 11 months then I’ve had mine for at least 12 and it’s still running which is the good news. 

I haven’t been charged, but it may be that you do need to enter some payment details and it’s worth keeping an eye on it. The free tier should last forever and is very generous as far as I’m aware. 

 

On 6/3/2020 at 2:59 PM, South Africa C4 user said:

I have been using this text to speech driver for the last year.  I have paid licenses for most (maybe all) of the third party text to speech drivers and this is definitely my favourite.

I received an e-mail today telling me that I have 30 days left on my GoogleCloud platform free trial. I am pretty sure that this relates to this driver and the  setup that was required to get it working when I first installed the driver 11 months ago. So a question for @Shivam Paw - do I need to upgrade to keep the text to speech working or will it just continue?

 

I've been getting the same messages, but I have been ignoring them.  Do I need to worry about them?  The email that I got today says "Your trial is over"...

 

Curious if anyone has gone beyond the "trial" end date, and if so if it quit working...

[South Africa C4 user]

1 hour ago, dw886 said:

 

I've been getting the same messages, but I have been ignoring them.  Do I need to worry about them?  The email that I got today says "Your trial is over"...

 

Curious if anyone has gone beyond the "trial" end date, and if so if it quit working...

I don’t recall getting the “trial is over” email (may have gone to junk).  But I am 2 months past the 30 day warning e-mail and it is all still working perfectly... 

[South Africa C4 user]

I’m still thoroughly enjoying this driver (A year later!).  Two enhancements that could be great ( @Shivam Paw) would include:

1. Inserting a xxx milliseconds blank at the beginning of the announcement. I know that the Announcement Agent is supposed to cater for this but since OS3.1.3, the start delay at the beginning of an announcement ha snot been working properly for me when using a large (e.g. 10) number of zones and I’ve had to resort to adding blank space at the beginning of doorbell announcements etc. that play to all zones.

2. A nice fun addition could be the ability to add certain sounds (dogs barking, door bell, police siren, Westminster chimes etc.) into an announcement. E.g. “ding dong - someone is at the door” or “Intruder alert, the police have been called - siren” or “Leave the property now - dogs barking - down boy!”

[Shivam Paw]

4 hours ago, South Africa C4 user said:

I’m still thoroughly enjoying this driver (A year later!).  Two enhancements that could be great ( @Shivam Paw) would include:

1. Inserting a xxx milliseconds blank at the beginning of the announcement. I know that the Announcement Agent is supposed to cater for this but since OS3.1.3, the start delay at the beginning of an announcement ha snot been working properly for me when using a large (e.g. 10) number of zones and I’ve had to resort to adding blank space at the beginning of doorbell announcements etc. that play to all zones.

2. A nice fun addition could be the ability to add certain sounds (dogs barking, door bell, police siren, Westminster chimes etc.) into an announcement. E.g. “ding dong - someone is at the door” or “Intruder alert, the police have been called - siren” or “Leave the property now - dogs barking - down boy!”

I’ll have a look at 1. I think I messed around with it at some point but didn’t get very far. 
 

For 2, it’s been suggested before but I’m not sure how it would work to be honest. There would need to be a way of somehow adding audio binary to Audio binary with screwing up the Audio binary :(

[Shivam Paw]

However. For you Apple users. If you’ve ever wanted to say “Hey siri announce a message” and then speak your message and have it announced. Now you can!

You’ll need to setup some port forwarding and a dynamic IP checker. No-IP is what I use. It’s free and you just have to confirm you’re using it every 30 days. 
 

Then in Siri Shortcuts:

 

The bit covered in red would be the No-IP domain & forwarded port of the TTS web service. 
 

If you don’t use the custom buttons you don’t need the bit in red brackets. 

[dw886]

Anyone else that's using this driver recently start getting failures?  This quit working for me - the MP3 file never gets updated.  When I look at the Google API, i can see that failures started sometime around the very end of Feb / beginning of March:

 

Looks like something is failing when calling the Google Text to Speech API, but I cannot see the failure to see if it's a misconfiguration issue on my Google account, or if it's something with the driver.

[Shivam Paw]

2 hours ago, dw886 said:

Anyone else that's using this driver recently start getting failures?  This quit working for me - the MP3 file never gets updated.  When I look at the Google API, i can see that failures started sometime around the very end of Feb / beginning of March:

 

Looks like something is failing when calling the Google Text to Speech API, but I cannot see the failure to see if it's a misconfiguration issue on my Google account, or if it's something with the driver.

I think this will be because you’ve not entered any billing details in the google account. It should continue to work for free for the majority of users, forever, as the free tier is extremely generous but you’ll need to enter billing details. 

[South Africa C4 user]

I had exactly the same problem... at the same point in time... and fixed this last week.  Interestingly, I had entered billing details at some stage (I had totally forgotten this) but the credit card used had expired last November... quite strange that the service only stopped working in late Feb / early March.  Anyway, entering new credit card details was an easy fix and I have never paid a cent despite using the same account for 2 residences and fairly frequent announcements...

[Shivam Paw]

I've moved this driver over to DriverCentral now and also made it so that if you do manually setup port forwarding for the web service, you would be able to submit voice messages from the port forwarded version without having to be on the actual directors network!

https://drivercentral.io/platforms/control4-drivers/text-to-speech-driver/

[Shivam Paw]

Released version 14 today which adds support for Google Studio Voices (they're very human like!). Currently only available in English US.

Also fixed a bug where the gender wasn't always working correctly for Google TTS.

[ERDrPC]

42 minutes ago, Shivam Paw said:

Released version 14 today which adds support for Google Studio Voices (they're very human like!). Currently only available in English US.

Also fixed a bug where the gender wasn't always working correctly for Google TTS.

Now that darksky no longer works; what weather driver do you recommend to pair with this driver 

[Shivam Paw]

Hey everyone, just released version 15 which adds the ability to add custom pauses in the text. This only works with Google Could Text to Speech.

For example, you can use: Hello %pause 5% world which will return an audio file which says "Hello" and then pauses for 5 seconds, before saying "world".

This can come in handy for small announcements which C4 doesn't really like, or maybe for dramatic effect

Lastly, there's also a discount active on DriverCentral till the end of the month for this driver: https://drivercentral.io/platforms/control4-drivers/text-to-speech-driver/

[Dueport]

5 hours ago, Shivam Paw said:

Hey everyone, just released version 15 which adds the ability to add custom pauses in the text. This only works with Google Could Text to Speech.

For example, you can use: Hello %pause 5% world which will return an audio file which says "Hello" and then pauses for 5 seconds, before saying "world".

This can come in handy for small announcements which C4 doesn't really like, or maybe for dramatic effect

Lastly, there's also a discount active on DriverCentral till the end of the month for this driver: https://drivercentral.io/platforms/control4-drivers/text-to-speech-driver/

Great update! We love this driver it gets used multiple times a day every day! Highly recommend it!

[South Africa C4 user]

4 hours ago, Dueport said:

Great update! We love this driver it gets used multiple times a day every day! Highly recommend it!

Hear hear! A great update to a great driver!

[South Africa C4 user]

I must say that I am really enjoying this version of the driver with the new pause functionality.  Two great benefits.  Firstly, I have added pauses inside certain announcements for effect.

Secondly, and more importantly, adding pauses at the front of my announcements does away with the need to use start and stop delays in the announcement agent which I have found to be notoriously unreliable. Now I never have announcements cutting off at the beginning in some zones  (even when playing announcements to 16 zones across multiple different amps).  
 

I always loved this driver but this latest version is a real upgrade!

[cnicholson]

Agreed.  Seems like great feature.   Sounds like I can get rid of my programming for AVR zones (if AVR OFF, turn it on. wait wait wait.  send announcement.  wait wait wait.  Turn off AVR.   Seems like the AVR, even when powered up, will cut audio for a moment if it needs to switch inputs to play the announcement, which is random based on the last source active.

[South Africa C4 user]

6 minutes ago, cnicholson said:

Agreed.  Seems like great feature.   Sounds like I can get rid of my programming for AVR zones (if AVR OFF, turn it on. wait wait wait.  send announcement.  wait wait wait.  Turn off AVR.   Seems like the AVR, even when powered up, will cut audio for a moment if it needs to switch inputs to play the announcement, which is random based on the last source active.

Agreed! I have similar issues and have done some fairly complex programming in the last 2 days to insert different lengths of pause at the front of the announcement depending on which zones the announcement will play to (anything from 1 second to 20 seconds - literally) and I now seem to have rock solid announcements which I have never managed previously. 

[ERDrPC]

On 6/7/2023 at 7:06 AM, ERDrPC said:

Now that darksky no longer works; what weather driver do you recommend to pair with this driver 

Any suggestions? I don't have a weather station as my home

[South Africa C4 user]

2 hours ago, ERDrPC said:

Any suggestions? I don't have a weather station as my home

I use the native C4 weather driver (free) at both my houses in conjunction with the TTS driver to get weather announcements over the speakers.

At one house, I also have a weather station and there, I enhance these announcements with info from my Tempest weather station.

[ERDrPC]

51 minutes ago, South Africa C4 user said:

I use the native C4 weather driver (free) at both my houses in conjunction with the TTS driver to get weather announcements over the speakers.

At one house, I also have a weather station and there, I enhance these announcements with info from my Tempest weather station.

Does the Native C4 drive poll its weather source using set intervals? WIll you get info like - in 1 hr it will snow (ie predicted weather)

 

[South Africa C4 user]

57 minutes ago, ERDrPC said:

Does the Native C4 drive poll its weather source using set intervals? WIll you get info like - in 1 hr it will snow (ie predicted weather)

 

Yes to your first question, there is a forecast in the native driver but it is a single forecast for the day (from memory) and not an hour ahead, 24 hours ahead etc.  and as we rarely see snow, I can’t comment on what it says / gives in terms of snow!