Since I am already running Kodi on the RPi in the living room, I suppose I could also do something with the Kodi OpenHAB binding and “play” commands to play pre-recorded notification sounds and/or pre-rendered text to speech files…
That might work especially in the case that RPi does not have the horsepower to run MaryTTS, perhaps that could be run on a more powerful server, and somehow the resulting files streamed over the network to play in the RPi in living room. I suspect doing all of that would result is some unacceptable latency…
Hope no one minds I’m using this thread as a place to collect my ideas and research… I usually use private text files for that purpose, but this way perhaps others will be helped who may be trying to do a similar thing (although the proprietary solutions seem much more “popular”, regrettably IMHO…).
EDIT:
OK, now I feel like a ninny!
All Kodi instances are registered as an audio sink in the framework. Audio streams are sent to the
playnotificationchannel and will change the volume of the audio sink using thenotificationVolumedefined in the properties for the thing, not thevolume.
I vaguely remember reading about that before, back before I had ordered hardware (Amp2). I think this is the avenue I will be pursuing. If I am understanding correctly, I should be able to run the MaryTTS (or other) speech engine / plug-in on the more powerful OpenHAB “server” back end (Cubietruck, ODROID-XU4 or similar) while then piping the audio files directly over the network to Kodi (via OpenHAB plug in) to be played on the speakers. I wonder how bad the network latency will be?
I will report back if/when I get that running. In the meantime, hopefully some of the terms I added will aid others in their search some day…