Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 10—Programs and the Visual Programmer
38 The Home Control Assistant
Speak
The Speak program element works with a Text-to-speech engine installed on your computer to
convert a piece of text into spoken words played through the computer sound system. HCA
doesn’t contain a text-to-speech engine and you must acquire one and install it before HCA can use
it. Check the Windows Control Panel Speech applet for information and installation on text-to-
speech.
The properties for the Speech element are
There are three options:
1. Speak some text. This text can contain embedded expressions that HCA evaluates and
replaces with the result.
2. Stop any current speech.
3. Stop any current speech and empty the speech queue.
It is important to remember that the Speech element adds the message to the text-to-speech engine
queue and moves on. As each item in it’s queue are completed the next item in the queue is
spoken. The last two options give you the ability to cancel the current text and to empty the speech
queue.
Start Program
The Start program element starts another program running. (Refer to the description of the On
and Off elements). Like the On or Off elements, the Start program element starts another program,
but it does
not continue until the started program completes.
1. Select the program that you want this element to start.
2. Select the type of command that starts the program. This is only important if the program
being started tests for the command that starts it. (Refer to the description of the
Test
element.).
The only limitation is that you can’t start the same program that contains the
Start element.