Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part I: Home Automation

This could easily be a much longer application—if you wanted, you could provide

usage information, comments, and exception handling. In fact, if you don’t pass it

a parameter, it’ll throw an unhandled exception. But hey, it’s just a hack.

Be sure that any computer you run this application on has the

.NET Framework installed. You can get the .NET Framework from

the Recommended Updates section of Windows Update at http://

windowsupdate.microsoft.com.

Speech Interface

Talking computers are the coolest thing. When I was a kid I had this soft-

ware for my Commodore 64 that would talk, and I would spend hours mak-

ing it say stupid, stupid things. (Hey, if you grew up in Pflugerville, Texas,

you’d probably have been driven to such nonsense too.)

First, the good news: computers can still talk! Now, the bad news: they still

don’t talk very well, and putting voice synthesis into a script isn’t as easy as

I would have hoped.

That said, AT&T Natural Voices is fantastic. It can be trained to the point that you

can hardly tell that it’s not a human being. It’s not free, but if really good synthe-

sized speech is important to you, it might be worth the cost.

A great deal of development time has been devoted to improving computer

voice synthesis, largely because it provides an interface for physically chal-

lenged people who can’t use a monitor. There ...