sayy - My wrapper on macOS's "say" command

[amterp]

macOS has a CLI command "say" to get a robotic voice to read out some text, which is a useful utility in some cases.

I had a bash script wrapping this to do a bit of "speech rate" scaling with the contents of the text it was reading (speed up when there's more content). It also hard codes a voice to make it less robotic. I recently ported this script to RSL. Here's the bash bersion:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

_args="$*"
_len=${#_args}

# Define minimum and maximum rates/lengths
min_rate=175
max_rate=200
diff_rate=$((max_rate - min_rate))
min_len=20
max_len=100
diff_len=$((max_len - min_len))

if [ "$_len" -le "$min_len" ]; then
    rate=$min_rate
elif [ "$_len" -ge "$max_len" ]; then
    rate=$max_rate
else
    rate=$((min_rate + (_len - 20) * diff_rate / diff_len))
fi

(say "$_args" -v "Zoe (Premium)" --rate=$rate &>/dev/null &)

And here is the RSL version:

#!/usr/bin/env rad
---
Convenience script for invoking 'say' on macOS. Scales speech speed according to length of text.
---
args:
    text string # What to say.

min_rate = 170
max_rate = 220
rate_diff = max_rate - min_rate

min_len = 20
max_len = 120
len_diff = max_len - min_len

text_len = clamp(len(text), min_len, max_len)

rate = min_rate + rate_diff * clamp((text_len - min_len) / len_diff, 0, 1)
rate = round(rate, 1)

debug("Rate:", rate)
quiet $!`say '{text}' -v "Zoe (Premium)" --rate={rate} &>/dev/null &`

The RSL version is the same length, despite being better in several ways:

• More readable
• Corrected logic: I was not clamping in the bash implementation, but this is built in in RSL (thanks to @gnana997's recent contributions!)
• Has a helpful usage string with -h.
• Can debug the calculated rate with -d (thanks to the global debug flag provided by Rad).

One improvement I can make in the RSL version is make the constants (max/mins) into additional args with defaults. However, before I do that, I want to allow referencing other args in range constraints (right now it's just number literals). That's on the todo.