Android as a Speech/Alarm Device released! And Updated!

I posted before about the issues I was having where this would stop working on my Fire Tablet. I finally found a rock solid way to make this work perfectly. This is probably niche and won’t help most people but here it is.

I have an IST 1000 intercom system in the house and was outputing the audio from the Fire Tablet to that intercom via the headphone jack. Since I have the intercom as an external speaker for LANannouncer I decided to just switch over to a Raspberry Pi 3 (older ones won’t work). I am running Emteria (Android) OS on the Pi3. I had to purchase the Emteria OS license for ~$23. I then just output the audio via the headphone jack on the Pi. This produces the fastest response time I have seen for any device I have tried this with. I am using this for door announcements and they occur almost instantaneously now! I am VERY pleased with this setup and really happy with the performance of LANannouncer for the first time ever.

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I am new to this forum and am looking for some help. I have tried to load both the SDK and Google Play versions of LANNouncer. When using the Silk Browser I get a message that the application is not compatible with my device. I am unable to find it via Google Play. I have a 7th generation Amazon Fire 7 tablet. Any help would be appreciated.

Try downloading it direct from:
http://www.keybounce.com/bin/LANnouncer.apk

I’ve also summarized the Install steps here:

Thank you for responding so quickly. I am able to download the file however when I select it. I receive a message – “Can’t open file”.

I have been able to install other APKs without issue.

Jim

Just curious any other ideas to help me get LANnouncer installed? Any specific device settings I should look for to help get past this?

As an update I found a variety of versions of LANnouncer.apk on the APKPure site. I tried the newest version V9.25.18 which would download but I received an error message “could not parse file” when I attempted to install it. I then tried V9.9.11 that version dated 2017-09-10 did install.

Good to know, where you successful in getting everything installed and running?

Making progress. I am trying to figure out how to play a specific sound via LANnouncer. I have a beep wav file that I would like to play but have not figured out how to do that yet. I can generate a sound or canned speech via the LANnouncer app, by pressing a tile. What I really want to do is play the wav sound when a door or window is opened. Right now I have a piezo buzzer emit the sound via the smart lighting app but that app does not see the LANnouncer devices like Big Talker does. Any hints or help would be greatly appreciated.

I haven’t played around with playing an actual .wav file. I use the very pleasant sounding built-in chimes using the command @#ALARM=CHIME in BigTalker 2 whenever a contact is opened or closed. There are other options as well that you can see here. You insert these commands where you would normally enter text for the TTS.
http://www.keybounce.com/lannouncer/commands/

Thanks for the help and advice. I had some challenges with keeping LANnouncer running on the fire tablets. It seemed as if they would go inactive (stop listening) randomly. I used Fully-Kiosk to force WiFi on and force the CPU to be always on. Once I did that everything seems to be stable. Thanks again.

Hmm, I have the 7th gen Fire Tablet HD8 with ads and I didn’t have those problems but I’m glad you were able to solve them.

Hey, Jim… I’m the author. Or, if you look at past messages, sometimes the victim of freeloading whiners. So I don’t visit here often because jerks who never even donated would use it for years and then make crap up about problems (cough cough @ndavis82 cough check the messages) So I’ve divorced myself a bit.

That said, use the Settings, at the upper left of the app screen. That three-vertical-dots menu (called the “hamburger” because, a few versions of Android earlier, it was more hamburgery, but always lacked cheese and pickles…) “Select Audio Files”. With Premium, you get five. With free, you get one, I think. But you probably only need one. The point of “Premium” is just to say “Thank you.”

Possibly - I’d have to check - you might have to convert your WAV to MP3. I’d use LAME, which I have some code in.

Anyhow, select that audio file, and then use the “@#ALARM=FILE1” command. This is described in the manual here. But there’s a lot in LANNouncer; it’s okay that you didn’t see what this was saying.

That command is sent as speech, essentially.

BTW, sometimes I suspect @Jimxenus knows my app better than I do. He really rocks.

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Thank you very much I will give this a try and let you know how it worked.

Jim

The "@#ALARM=FILE1” worked! I was able to find a nice mp3 file that played loud enough to be clearly heard throughout the house. The door chime was nice, just not loud enough. Thank you @NWTony and @Jimxenus for your help and guidance.

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I’ve had the Lannouncer going inactive issue for quite some time with my 2 HD8s, mostly cured but not 100%. I have Fully with ActionTiles running on the display 100% with no device sleep time, but occasionally Lannouncer still seems to be put to sleep, becomes inactive and stops talking. I’ve also installed Wifi keep alive, and SpeakerBoost (run at your own risk, I have mine set to 20%) to pump up the sound.

A similar setup on an old HTC phone never has a problem.

Hi I’m currently using LANnouncer with WebCore, and on my new Fire 8 Speech Syntesis doesn’t work, while chimes and alarm work.

On my older Fire everything work (the same piston make the Fire 7 speak, while the Fire 8 doesn’t).

How could I fix this?

I’m not sure what the problem is, did you make sure you chose speech synthesis, and not music player? You might also want to try a different app such as BigTalker2 and see if that works. Once again, make sure you choose the speech synthesis option when you first configure BigTalker2.

I’m not using big talker, I’m using WebCore and I dn’t see any “speech syntesis” option, where is it?

Sorry but I’m not completely knowledgeable about WebCore, that is why I suggested BigTalker2 to see if it works. Maybe someone else can chime in on WebCore.

Unfortunately Big Talker won’t do, thanks anyway.