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Hear new Mail messages announced by customized voices
Authored by: sinebubble on Mar 18, '03 03:01:20PM

Very cool. I like the English UK voice Audrey. The trick is to record a bunch of different ways of saying "new message from XXX" "you have a new email from XXX" and then script Eudora (or your favorite email app) to pick a random one for each person.



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Hear new Mail messages announced by customized voices
Authored by: maczac on Mar 18, '03 05:43:33PM

How would you do this for Entourage? How do you add more sounds to the default set?

I used to be fairly adept at scripting with AppleScript but for the life of me cannot write a simple AppleScript to play a .aiff file any longer.

used to be able to:

open file "path:to:file:sound.aiff"

but that no longer works, neither does enclosing it in a tell finder statement.

TIA
Zac

---
Chris



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Hear new Mail messages announced by customized voices
Authored by: Frederico on Mar 18, '03 06:05:01PM

Simple sound activation via AppleScript has been broken for some time now. Also, Entourage's ability to see and play installed System sounds has not worked since Office X came out. Yes, very annoying.

The workaround is to install Play Sound
<http://MicrocosmSoftware.com>

...and then use AppleScript to tell Play Sound to play sounds installed in your /Libary/Sounds or ~/Library/Sounds folders.

e.g.:

tell application "Finder"
set thePath to ":Users:rico:Library:Sounds" as alias
set TheSound to document file "Uh oh.aiff" of thePath as alias
tell application "Play Sound"
play TheSound
end tell
end tell

Problem with this is it's tedious as heck to make an AS for each and every sound you may wish to play.

Perhaps easier to the purpose of speaking variables such as Sender and Subject, why not just use the 'Announce Sender' script included with Entourage?

Just edit it to speak only the variables you wish, and use the voice you wish, then apply it as a Rule to desired emails. For example, I don't want email from every subscriber list announced, nor do I want to hear about SPAM, but I do want to hear about mail that is filtered to important purposes, such as business contacts, frioends, etc. For most, I just play a cool sound byte from a song, or a standard System sound (I have converted every Apple sound dating from 1984 to present to AIFF), but for a few purposes I do use the announce script (with a different voice:


tell application "Microsoft Entourage"
--optionally uncomment the following line
if frontmost then return -- don't announce if Entourage is frontmost application
-- get the currently selected message or messages
set selectedMessages to current messages
repeat with theMessage in selectedMessages
-- get the information from the message,
-- and store it in variables
set theName to sender of theMessage
set theName to display name of theName
set theSubject to subject of theMessage
set theVoice to "Kathy"
say "new message from..." & theName & "...regarding..." & theSubject using theVoice
end repeat
end tell

HTH

Frederico



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