Play Sound Action

[Semper Vaporo]

I appreciate the rule "Action - Play Sound" feature. I especially like the supplied sound, "Person detected; Recording video." (Clear and emphatic; easily understood.) But when running 4 cameras I needed more info as to which camera had tripped a rule. So I created my own sound files wherein I spliced one of the compass directions (in my voice) onto both the beginning and end of a copy of the supplied file... producing, "North. Person detected; Recording Video. North." and likewise other sound files for "South, East, and West".

I had to put the compass direction on both the beginning and end to help me recognize which rule had been tripped.

If I put the direction only on the beginning, sometimes I didn't understand the word due to the suddenness of it occurring when I was not paying attention to the computer at the time... I would just hear that there was a noise, and then I would recognize the "Person detected..." phrase, but have no idea which thumbnail to look at to see if there was still some motion in it, or to know which one to click on to view in the larger area of the VDV window.

If I put it only on the end, then due to the tardy way Winders gets around to playing the sound, the cause of the rule trip had often totally left the area, and I would have to revert to the playback mode to see what it was.

So I put it both places and most times I can orient myself quickly enough to see what is going on. This works fairly well if I am in the room with the computer. But if I have stepped some distance away, what I hear is one of the two following attempts to spell what it sounds like...

"Skritchit. Person detected; Recording video. Skritchit" or, "BARK. Person detected; Recording video. BARK."

And no amount of trying to learn what "Skritchit" or "BARK" translates to has gotten me to the point of being able to understand what it is really playing.

"MY" voice just doesn't record and/or playback well.

So I have given this a serious amount of cogitation as to what to do. At first I thought I would like for you to provide a whole set of sound files, but I am sure you have better things to do than to create hundreds of possible phrases for all the possibilities that people would like. Besides the compass directions, there could be: "Front/Rear/Side - Entrance/Door/Window", "Door (-1-2-3...), "Window (-1-2-3...), "Camera (-1-2-3... -A-B-C...)", "(North-South-East-West-) Lobby", "(Center-Left-Right-) Sales Counter, Register (-1-2-3...), Garage Bay (-1-2-3...), Stock/Waiting/Rest-room, Lab/Shop/Office"... Well, you get the idea; it is way too much to have to supply with the program for I am sure someone will think of one more to request of you. (Not to mention "Skritchit" and "BARK!".)

I thought maybe you could supply just a few single words that the user could select for the program to play successively, instead of just one phrase, like: "Camera" - "Two" - "East" - "Lobby". Besides the serious amount of coding on your part to do this, I have written software to do it and the result is quite klutzy without lots of work on the individual files to get the frequencies and volumes similar (I am sure you have heard some telephone response systems that sound terrible at this when they repeat back your phone or account number to you).

Then I remembered a utility program I had for my Atari 800XL named "S.A.M. the Software Automatic Mouth" that would speak any phrase of text that a program passed to it. Since it produced sounds based on phonics rules it could produce easily understood sounds; especially if the text was spelled phonetically (instead of correctly) to fit the phonics rules it had.

That reminded me that Winders used to have a program named "Narrator" that was the worst program I have ever tried to use. I just tried it again and they have not in any way improved it in Winders 7. It still pauses in all the wrong places and not at all at periods.

But I am sure you could control the Narrator routines better within VDV, and have an option for it to speak the name of the camera that the user assigned to it (the user may have to learn how to spell the name phonetically) and then play another user selected sound file, such as the supplied, "Person detected..." file (or something else the user has supplied).

And then, just for me, I'd like it to repeat the camera name again.

[ryan]

Hiya Semper,

With the right software you can certainly set something like this up using the "Run the command" response option.

On OSX there is a utility called "say". From a terminal you can type "say [whatever words you want]" and it will read your text to you. If I create a rule and in the "Run the command" box type "say Intruder detected on north camera" my machine will announce that anytime the rule is triggered. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to trigger Narrator on windows. There might be methods my search didn't turn up, or there might be other software on windows you could download has an executable which accepts parameters.