Feature Requests

Please add all future feature requests to this thread.

Hi Dave,

It should be nice if it would be possible to adjust the words per minute rate. I think that it’s to fast at the moment and would like to have the possibility to slow it down when you have longer and more complex announcements.


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Hi Dave,

It should be nice if it would be possible to adjust the words per minute rate. I think that it’s to fast at the moment and would like to have the possibility to slow it down when you have longer and more complex announcements.


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Thanks for the suggestion. I'll add this to the list of things to take a look at the next time that I'm in the plugin code. I need to think about how best to implement such a feature. The reason: it's a bit more complicated than it may appear which will become evident in a moment. I need to figure out the best way to expose the following information in the plugin device.

As it turns out, you already have this power! Apple's embedded speech system has ways to adjust the spoken strings that can make some significant changes in the way that the speech is rendered. For your circumstance, you could try something like this (the value is in words per minute):

Code: Select all

say "[[rate 150]]This is a sentence with seven words."


You can play with this within the announcements device settings pane or enter the text directly in Terminal with the `say` command and adjust the rate value to taste. Take small bites at the apple as these adjustments can have weird outcomes if you're not cautious. I'd guess the default rate is around 175 WPM. There are other useful codes as well. You can find references to these modifiers and an example on the Tutorials page of the plugin wiki.

Hi Dave,

Thanks a lot, it’s working perfect.

Tried a lot of settings and you can’t go below 145 unless you want her to sound sleepy.

Next project will be to replace a dot with a comma in the weather announcements.
We don’t have the same decimal separator and it can make it sound weird in an announcement.


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Glad to hear that's working well for you. Yes, the comma separator issue has come up before. I was never able to find a way to universally handle this through code. I'm frankly surprised that the system settings forLanguages and Regions doesn't handle this. With more current OS versions (I'm on Catalina) there is an ability within the Languages and Regions pane for making application-specific adjustments; however, I've never toyed with those so I can't be much help there I'm afraid.

Hi Dave,

Played around with different settings and found something wired when I tried to put in a moment of silence.

There is a remarkable difference between [[slnc 900]] and [[slnc 1000]] and almost no difference between 900 and 400, it’s like it’s not working with values less than 1000 milliseconds?


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I think it may be a matter of perception. I wrote a simple script to investigate and--while it's difficult to discern the difference in the steps audibly--there's clearly a difference between the beginning and end of the loop. This script demonstrates it:

Code: Select all

from os import system
import datetime as dt

for r in range(1000, 0, -100):
   now = dt.datetime.now()
   system('say one [[slnc {}]] two'.format(r))
   print(dt.datetime.now() - now)


0:00:02.280117
0:00:02.172002
0:00:02.073821
0:00:01.967781
0:00:01.874026
0:00:01.775612
0:00:01.670471
0:00:01.573126
0:00:01.477721
0:00:01.371177

While not an exhaustive (or extremely accurate) test, it's clear that the statement is getting progressively shorter. There shouldn't be any effect of running the statement through the plugin because the speech synthesis is interpreted by the operating system. I'd suggest using something that sounds right to your ear regardless of the actual value you use.