[OBSOLETE 1.1.12 3/13/2017] Big Talker - Talk when events occur

I don’t think I could do per speaker. Not without a lot of code. I’ll need to investigate that possibility.

I could see perhaps doing a global minimum volume though which would let you change it from the current 50% threshold to say 25%. This would keep your bedroom speaker at 25% if it is at it already or above it, but if it’s at 19% it would raise it to 25% to speak and then set it back to 19%. Your Living Room speaker that is at 65% already would just stay at 65%. This would be if your global desired default volume is not set. If your global desired default volume is set and the speaker volume is less than that value then it would be raised to the desired default volume for speaking and then returned to the last known volume for that device.

Regarding the second instance. You could do that and make sure that in the second instance that the bedroom speaker is only used in the second instance (not in the first to prevent the clipping that you mentioned). You would then set the default volume in that instance to 25%.

I like this idea. so if you set to 25 default and I have the speaker itself set to 30 it would stay at 30, is that correct?

So long as the global default volume is not set, yes.

Well, that is exactly what I am looking for. I want to manually set my living room speaker to 50 and bedroom to 35 so if you set the default to 25 that would work perfectly for me, can you please make that possible?

I’ll look into it. ETA up to 3 weeks (I’ll be out for a week and not able to work on it).

I appreciate. I would consider lowering the default to 5, 10 or 15 to give people a little more room to wiggle.

After this discussion, I intend for the minimum to be a user configurable setting, globally. You will be able to choose what that is on a scale of 0 - 100.

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I think that is perfect.

I’ve finally figured this out.
Personality option is coming to BigTalker in the next couple of weeks and will be expanded upon/adjusted based on feedback. It will be introduced in 1.1.13. Send me a PM if you would like to beta test it once I get to that point.

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I set VLC Thing up and was able to perform the
test sound successfully from the My Home section. However, when I go into the
Big Talker app and try to send a phrase using the “Talk Now” function,
it gives me an error like the one in this image. Any ideas on what is
happening?

This is a SmartThings, VLCThing and/or VlC issue.
At this point, BigTalker has already made the SmartThings API calls to convert text to speech. SmartThings does so and returns an MP3 to be played which is sent to your musicPlayer (Sonos, VLCThing, etc). The device (VlC in this case) goes out to download the file and play it from SmartThings host. In this case the file couldn’t be downloaded, opened or played.
Since VlC and VLCThing are not SmartThings created, I suspect their support will not help out but you could try to email them. Also try other phrases, perhaps a bit longer than one word… Try typing in Front Door Is Now Open and see what it does. This phrase is likely cached on SmartThings servers and will not have to be converted and new MP3 created

Thanks for the info. I tried a longer phrase, but that gives me the same error. I wonder if something in my VLC settings isn’t quite correct.

Copy and paste the MP3 URL into your web browser and see if it plays

The url for ‘hello’ plays, but any other longer custom phrase does not play.

You can probably contact SmartThings support with the URLs that are not playing from their system and hopefully get them to fix whatever the backend problem is with those. Just tell them you are sending phrases for text to speech using playTextAndRestore() or PlayTextAndResume() . Send them a working URL vs some non working URLs and see if they can reproduce. I bet that will get the ball rolling on fixing it which will fix it for VlC, VLCThing, and BigTalker for you.

Great, thanks for the help! I will do that

@rayzurbock AFTER YOU ARE HOME FROM VACATION: Can I use a statement instead of %device% For example I just want to say that my mail has arrived when a contact sensor is opened?

when you are configuring the group the second slot - that says “Say this when [opened]” You can type text in there (a statement) of your choice. So something like “The mail has arrived”

Hi all, I have been using Big Talker for a bit. I finally got it up and running. I’m using LANannouncer and big talker to get this to come out of my amazon echo. I am using SmartThings to replace my Vivint home security system. Once I get this figured out I will be back with security functioning at Vivint levels for no monthly fee! My question is, is it possible to have it announce things like “front door is now open” and also do things like chime when the window opens? I have read all over the forums hoping to find the answer to no avail…please help!!!

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BigTalker itself is focused solely on sending spoken audio to the devices. Since you are using LANnouncer, you can configure an event in BigTalker to speak the phrase @|ALARM=CHIME to trigger LANnouncer’s chime tone. This is a LANNouncer only function and will not work with anything other than LANnouncer. So you could have a contact group configured for your doors %devicename% is now %devicechange% to have it speak “Front Door is now Open” and another contact group with your windows that have the phrase @|ALARM=CHIME for when they open.

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