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Sound & UI – Voice Announcement with SONOS and IBM Watson text-to-speech

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This flow demonstrates how to make Voice Announcements with SONOS speakers using  IBM Watson TTS (text-to-speech) service.

  • IBM Watson – Pros: The output audio is very close to human speech.
  • IBM Watson – Cons: More complicated setup than Google.

The TTS converts an arbitrary text to an audio file, several languages and voices are supported.  An audio file is the result of the operation. The audio files stored on the realKNX file system. The SONOS speaker downloads the audio file from the realKNX via HTTP. The HTTP server provides the audio file to the SONOS speaker.

The input to TTS is either a hard-coded strings (Long/Short test msg) or a message from PushBullet.

To use IBM WatsonText-To-Speech, do this:

1. Install ‘node-red-node-watson’ from the palette. Select top right Menu | Manage palette | Install
2. Signup to [IBM Watson/Bluemix](https://console.bluemix.net/)
3. Goto IBM Bluemix Application Services and activate the ‘Text to Speech’ service
5. Open Service credentials and copy Username and password to the Text-To-Speech node
6. Select language and voice.

Required nodes

  • node-red-contrib-better-sonos
  • node-red-node-watson

IBM Watson Text to Speech Synthesizes natural-sounding speech from text
input (text string):

  • Brazilian Portuguese plain text
  • English plain text
  • French plain text
  • German plain text
  • Italian plain text
  • Japanese plain text
  • Spanish plain text

output (audio file):

  • Brazilian Portuguese speech (1 female voice)
  • US English speech (choose between 3 voices: 2 female, 1 male)
  • UK English speech (1 female voice)
  • French speech (1 female voice)
  • German speech (choose between 2 voices: 1 female, 1 male)
  • Japanese speech (1 female voice)
  • Italian speech (1 female voice)
  • Castilian Spanish speech (choose between 2 voices: 1 female, 1 male)
  • North American Spanish speech (1 female voice)

Voice To Sonos

Download Codesound-ui-sonos-watson.json

How-to import: Video Tutorial