How to Make your Linux Pc Speak/talk : Any thing from time , date or , tweets[tip]

Ok this is really cool!! think when you power on your Linux machine it welcomes you, it tells you the current time and date tells you who are online who have mentions you in tweets . well this is freaking awesome . You do this with ease if you are using ubuntu , fedora or  Linux mint 12 or any other Linux flavors . ok then let start to learn how to do that .

All Linux flavor provide us a text to speech software festival . The command festival will be used to convert our text to speech here is an example of how to do that .

$ echo ” hello how are you ” | festival –tts 

Type this command in terminal and you will hear a voice [yes this is your computer’s voice ] i will speak what we have given in the echo command now lets create a welcome script which will welcome you win you power on your pc .

week=$(date +”%A” )
day=$(date +”%e” )
echo hello $USER you are super awesome i am your processor | festival –tts
echo today is $week $day | festival –tts
echo have a nice day | festival –tts

Save this script in welcome.sh and run in terminal sh welcome.sh . Now you hear a voice welcoming you and telling you the date and the time . set this script in you startup application to run it automatically when you log on .

Now let us see another script which will impress your friends .

echo “opening google chrome ” | festival –tts
google-chrome &
echo “done” | festival –tts
echo “opening empathy ” | festival –tts
empathy &
echo “done ” | festival –tts
echo “opening x chat ” | festival –tts
xchat &
echo “done ” | festival –tts

Now save this script as myhub.sh . Now what this script will do is open your application at once .  if you use some application on daily basis add the application to your script . This script will speak which application is going to be opened and this sound really cool . Now its on you what cool things can you do with this application . you can do many things like , knowing who are online , how many unread mail are in your inbox , if some body has mentions you on twitter .

I am working on a script which will speak tweets will update it in my next post .