Offloading Elk announcements/chimes to Girder

[chrisexv6]

Read a couple threads on making Elks announcements/chimes more custom and robust by using the Elk 124 and 129 products. Ive also read a few posts saying you can use Girder to do the same, but I didnt really see any how-tos on what to do.

So for anyone that has offloaded Elk speech stuff to Girder, how is it done? Does the Elk output 2 become a line level input to a Girder box?

Or is it as simple as setting up corresponding rules in Girder that tell it what to speak and when (I noticed the Elk plugin for Girder can react to all sorts of zone updates, etc)? And of course make sure the sound output of the Girder box is connected to whatever speakers I want to use (in this case, Elk sp12)

Thanks in advance.

-Chris

 

[chrisexv6]

Well to answer my own question, yes Virginia it does seem that simple! Setup Girder trial on a test machine and had it running pretty quickly.

Now my only question is if Girder license is worth it vs just getting the Elk hardware (Elk hardware a tad more expensive but my guess is it would respond faster, etc)

 

[electron]

I would look at some free solutions, many of them support TTS (text-to-speech), and support ELK. Check out the link in my sig, but I believe Premise supports both ELK and TTS, and is free. Also keep in mind that the ELK vocabulary is limited.

I personally use software to take care of announcements, and I have a heartbeat between the software and ELK, so should the PC crash (doesn't happen tho), the ELK can take over the critical announcements.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

You can switch back and forth between the Elk and the computer via a relay, then just use code to activate that relay before Girder says an announcement, then back off after that announcement is made. I have a post on how to do this on this forum.

One thing to notice is the voice from the computer will be a lot better quality than the Elk. Might not be a big deal to you, but it was to my family.

 

[123]

Chock full of TTS features: http://cocoontech.com/forums/files/file/133-module-texttospeech/

 

[chrisexv6]

Thanks everyone!

I didnt realize there was such a large amount of support for a "dead" product like Premise. Also helps that its FREE!

I will definitely be leaning towards a Premise implementation.

Since I want to offload the chime sounds too (I hate the built in Elk sound), I will probably be using Premise 99% of the time. I will add a relay to switch to the Elk, in case the Premise box is unreachable or goes down. Only real noise I need coming from the Elk is the siren and fire stuff, which are both unrelated to Output 1 anyway.

Ill probably start a new thread as I start setting all of this up. It looks pretty similar to Girder (setup wise, anyway) so Im sure I can get it running quickly....then comes the fun part about how deep I want to get into it.

Thanks again.

-Chris