openhab-addons/bundles/org.openhab.voice.voicerss

VoiceRSS Text-to-Speech

Overview

VoiceRSS is an Internet based TTS service hosted at https://api.voicerss.org. You must obtain an API Key to get access to this service. The free version allows you to make up to 350 requests per day; for more you may need a commercial subscription.

For more information, see http://www.voicerss.org/.

Samples

Replace API_KEY with your personal API key for simple testing of different API calls:

# EN
https://api.voicerss.org/?key=API_KEY&hl=en-us&src=Hello%20World
https://api.voicerss.org/?key=API_KEY&hl=en-us&c=WAV&src=Hello%20World
https://api.voicerss.org/?key=API_KEY&hl=en-us&f=44khz_16bit_mono&src=Hello%20World
https://api.voicerss.org/?key=API_KEY&hl=en-gb&f=44khz_16bit_stereo&src=Hello%20World

# DE
https://api.voicerss.org/?key=API_KEY&hl=de-de&f=44khz_16bit_mono&src=Hallo%20Welt

Configuration

You must add your API_KEY to your configuration by adding a file "voicerss.cfg" to the services folder, with this entry:

apiKey=1234567890

It actually supports only one voice: "voicerss:default", which is configured to use 44kHz, mono, 16 bit sampling quality.

Caching

The VoiceRSS extension does cache audio files from previous requests, to reduce traffic, improve performance, reduce number of requests and provide same time offline capability.

For convenience, there is a tool where the audio cache can be generated in advance, to have a prefilled cache when starting this extension. You have to copy the generated data to your userdata/voicerss/cache folder.

Synopsis of this tool:

Usage: java org.openhab.voice.voicerss.tool.CreateTTSCache <args>
Arguments: --api-key <key> <cache-dir> <locale> { <text> | @inputfile }
  key       the VoiceRSS API Key, e.g. "123456789"
  cache-dir is directory where the files will be stored, e.g. "voicerss-cache"
  locale    the language locale, has to be valid, e.g. "en-us", "de-de"
  text      the text to create audio file for, e.g. "Hello World"
  inputfile a name of a file, where all lines will be translatet to text, e.g. "@message.txt"

Sample: java org.openhab.voice.voicerss.tool.CreateTTSCache --api-key 1234567890 cache en-US @messages.txt

Open Issues

• add all media formats
• add all supported languages
• do not log API-Key in plain text