Control4 Driver - Advanced Announcements

SMARTER ANNOUNCEMENTS

Your home automation system has the ability to play audio announcements through the audio outputs on its controllers and speaker points. These announcements can play back any file encoded in a wav format. Traditionally these announcements have been used for doorbells and pre-recorded messages.

Chowmain’s Advanced Announcements driver expands the announcement agent by providing integration with web based text to speech engines. This gives you futuristic dynamically generated voice notifications over your system without any additional hardware.

The driver also allows you to record your voice via its built in webpage to play through your Control4 system like a PA system.  Visit the URL in the properties page for usage.

FEATURES

• Compatible with native Control4 announcements as well as Sonos announcements

• Dynamic text-to-speech (TTS) generation for on-demand voice announcements
• Live voice capture for PA-style announcements using a phone or PC microphone via web browser (limited to local network access, or remote access via VPN only)
• Control4 T3, T4 and T5 touchscreens, along with iOS and Android apps, support both local and remote TTS generation
• Web browser interface for creating and triggering announcements on the local network
• Programmatic TTS generation via the Control4 Programming tab
• Built-in ability to announce current time
• Built-in ability to announce current date
• Support for dynamic variable injection (e.g. energy usage, temperature, system states)

FAQ

Can you give us some examples of how we could use this driver?

• Reading out the time and date to the blind eg “the time currently is 10:00am”.
• Notifying you about how many times your phone has rung whilst you were out. eg “Whilst you were out you received 3 phone calls”.
• Notifying you about how many times your doorbell has been pressed whilst you were out. eg “Whilst you were out your doorbell was pressed twice”.
• Notifying you about the weather forecast for the day eg “The weather forecast for today is late showers with a minimum of 5 and maximum of 13 degrees”.
• Notifying you about the current energy usage. eg “Your house is currently using 4.5 kilowatts hours”.
• This driver has the ability to use any variable from within a Control4 system. That means any 3rd party driver variable can be spoken in your announcement. From energy consumption to weather information the uses are endless.
• This driver will be useful for the blind. Getting notifications on their environment will greatly assist with their daily lives.
• This driver has the ability to record audio from HTML5 enabled browsers on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and Android devices.  Use it to send voice recorded PA sytle announcements through Control4 to any connected speaker. Note This has been tested on Mozilla Firefox browser only.  Note as of Version 37 it will no longer work with Google Chrome.
   

What do the voices sound like?
There are so many voices that it is hard to post samples of them all. We recommend you visit the engine websites to give it a try (SpeechUtil.com, VoiceRSS.org, iSpeech.org) prior to installation. Here is one we geneated earlier.

Advanced Announcement Example Voice