Talks gem — now your ruby and command-line tools can talk with you

This is beta now.

Build Status

If you want to HEAR some response from your code or command-line tools, just use this gem.

You can use this gem on MacOS X and on other linux/unix systems with installed espeak.

Sponsored by Evil Martians http://evilmartians.com

Why?

For example - some really long task and you just get some coffee, read book or surf internet and you want to know when this task will ends, but don't want to check your mac or terminal each minute - you can just add small hook in the end of your code and when it will ends - you will hear it with voice that you choose from MacOS X say function collection or from espeak collection.

You can find some examples of talks usage in organization ruby-talks:

How?

On MacOS X this gem just using native MacOS X say command line tool. On linix/unix this gem using espeak speech synthesis.

In all examples below I used MacOS X voice types. For espeak you can read section Using talks with espeak

Configuration

You can configure default voices and messages for talks with ~/.talksrc file or with your_project/.talksrc file. It should be written in YAML format:

~/.talksrc

default_voice: 'whisper'
engine: 'say'
voices:
  info: 'pipe'
messages:
  info: 'hello'
  warn: 'WE GONNA DIE!!!'

The same you can do in your code dynamicly through Talks.config instance. You can configure now only default voice for say method and voices and messages for 4 types of talks: info, warn, success, error

For command-line commands you can configure default voices and hook messages:

~/.talksrc

bundle:
  voice: 'vicki'
  before_message: 'Bundler again will do all right'
  after_message: "Bundler's job is done here"

You can create your own default preferences for each command-line tool which you want to run with talks or talking command in front:

~/.talksrc

ls:
  voice: 'bad'
  before_message: 'Now we will see what in the directory'
  after_message: ''
cap:
  ...
vim:
  ...
scp:
  ...
... and etc

Using talks/talking command-line tool

talks or talking command-line tool wrap your command-line commands with talks hooks:

$ talking bundle install

After that talks will wrap execution of this command with voice messages. By default messages will be like 'command_name task started/ended'. You can preconfigure messages in your ~/.talksrc file or you can send options right in talking command:

$ talking -v agnes -bm 'We gonna die!' -am 'Not sure if we can hear that' rm -rf ./
# the same
$ talking --voice agnes --before-message 'We...' --after-message 'Not...' rm -rf ./

Using talks in your code

$ gem install talks

Then in your code you can require and use Talks functions:

require 'talks'

Talks.say 'Hello bro!'

# There are 4 types of voice: say or info, warn, success, error
Talks.info 'This is info'
# Talks.warn 'Some text'
# Talks.success 'Some text'
# Talks.error 'Some text'

Talks.say can be customized with type of message and voice by adding options to executing this method:

Talks.say 'Hello like pipe', voice: 'pipe'
Talks.say 'Hello like error', type: :error # the same as using Talks.error

All voices which I found in manual for say:

VOICES = %w(
  agnes albert alex bad bahh bells boing bruce bubbles cellos
  deranged fred good hysterical junior kathy pipe princess ralph
  trinoids vicki victoria whisper zarvox
)

Using talks with espeak

You can configure your talks usage even on MacOS X for using espeak:

~/.talksrc

engine: 'espeak'

Otherwise talks will set engine by default to say on MacOS X and to espeak on all other OS if command which espeak returns something than empty string.

For espeak you have different set of voices and many languages (which this gem not support yet). Voices for espeak:

Talks.voices[:espeak]
# =>
  [
    'en+m1', 'en+m2', 'en+m3', 'en+m4', 'en+m5', 'en+m6', 'en+m7',
    'en+f1', 'en+f2', 'en+f3', 'en+f4', 'en+f5', 'en+f6', 'en+f7'
  ]

Who?

I did it by myself

Contributors

@gazay

A lot of thanks

@aderyabin - idea of extended customization of talks is his.
@brainopia - bro helps me with any my idea. He adviced me to do command line tool talks.

You can help me with this fun gem and I'll gladly add you here, or above

License

The MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.