Table of Contents
Customising the launcher itself is not hard to do and allows you to make big changes to how the interface of AudioQuake works. Read on for more information.
This is not strictly customising the launcher, but does have a great effect on how AudioQuake sounds if you're using the SAPI interface. Your default voice is set in the “Speech” Control Panel applet and it is this voice that the SAPI interface uses to talk to you. Here are the steps you would need to follow to change the default voice:
Get to the Control Panel (Start
, Settings
, Control Panel
).
Open the “Speech” icon to start the Speech Control Panel applet.
When the applet opens, you'll be on the first of three tabs (“Speech Recognition”). The option for the default voice is on the second tab, “Text To Speech”. Move to the second tab and then down through the controls. Quite soon, you'll get to a section labelled “Voice Selection”. There is a drop-down list here that allows you to chose the default voice. We recommend either Mary or Mike.
To save your changes, move to the OK
button and activate it.
You can now close the Control Panel. Your new choice of default voice will be used when you next start the AudioQuake launcher.
The next sections in this chapter cover options you set inside the launcher itself. This section explains the general procedure for editing launcher settings.
The launcher is actually a plain text file and can be easily edited with your favourite text editor (such as vim or notepad). In this file, there are a number of lines you can edit to change the way speech output works. They've been grouped together into a configuration section. At the time of writing, this section starts on line 46 of the start.pl
file (there are comments in the file that explain where it starts and ends).
There are a number of settings (“variables”) you can configure. For example, if you want to change from using the SAPI interface to using a hardware synthesiser and you're running Windows, you'd change the line:
my $win32_talker = '|ag_say.exe';
To something more like this:
my $win32_talker = '>COM1:';
When you're changing a variable, only edit what lies between the two single or double quotes on that line of the script.
Please read on for more specific information about changing to a hardware speech synthesiser; this was just an example.
There are a lot of comments in the file (lines beginning with a hash) that explain the meaning of these variables and give suggestions of how you might like to alter them.
The start.pl program is the same on Linux and Windows. Some configuration variables only take effect on either of the two systems.
If you're running Linux, you can ignore all variables that have “win32” in their names – you need to edit variables with “nix” in their names.
Likewise, if you're running Windows, you need to edit only the variables with “win32” in their names and can safely ignore variables with “nix” in their names.
If you're using Linux, you might want to customise which software synthesiser AudioQuake should use. Do this by editing the “$nix_talker” variable. Examples of possible TTS engines are given in the script.
It is not expected that Windows users would need to use a different TTS program but it is as simple as altering the “$win32_talker” variable.
Remember that if you're using a software synthesiser, you'll want to put the pipe (“|”) character before the first letter of the path to the program. This instructs the AudioQuake launcher to send data to the program in the correct way.
If you have a hardware speech synthesiser or Braille display attached to your computer's serial port, you can set up the launcher to work with it instead of the SAPI interface.
To set up a serial speech synthesiser or Braille display, you will need to change the following variables:
If you're on Linux, change the “$nix_talker” variable to “>/dev/ttyS0” (or ttyS1 if the device is attached to your second serial port).
If you're running Windows, change the “$win32_talker” variable to “>COM1” (or COM2 if the device is attached to your second serial port).
Modify the “$nix_init_command” or “$win32_init_command” variable accordingly. These variables are used to set up the serial port so that it sends data to the device in the right format.
Examples of commands you could put into these variables are given in the file and in most cases a simple copy and paste should be all that's required to get things going. If it's not working, consult the device's manual.
Modify the “$init_string” variable if necessary. Some synthesisers require a message to be sent to them before they can start talking (to set up the voice, for example). This variable contains that message. Not all devices require this, so you might not need to alter it.
You'll probably want to change the “$high_priority_prefix” variable too. This is the data that is sent to the device just before a message of high importance. The reason for having this feature is so that we can force the device to stop speaking what it was saying and say an important message straight away.
Again, details on what you'll probably want to change this variable to can be found in the start.pl
script.
Currently there is only one other launcher option. This controls if the launcher prints out anything on the console/screen it was started from. It's on by default.
The variable is called “$print_to_stdout_flag” and there are comments below it that explain why you may or may not want to alter it.