[mh] Alexa TTS

Hi folks,

I was recently doing some reading on recent updates to the Alexa Skills 
Kit APIs this past weekend and happened upon 
https://github.com/thorsten-gehrig/alexa-remote-control . This struck a 
chord as this tool leverages ASK APIs that provide an ability to do 
unsolicited TTS on one or more devices. Our household has various types 
of Echo devices spread across the house that can control MH, but I 
hadn't until this point discovered a way to send unsolicited audio or 
TTS to them. Alexa-remote-control demonstrates a way to do this, so as 
an experiment, I whipped up a simple wrapper script to send MH speech 
output to the Alexa devices in the /Everywhere /group (note that you 
will need to set environment variables or modify alexa-remote-control.sh 
to apply the appropriate options for your locale/refresh 
token/language/etc for you)

/#!/usr/bin/perl -w/
/#/
/use strict;/
/use Getopt::Long;/

/my $alexa_remote = "/usr/local/bin/alexa_remote_control.sh";/
/my %parms;/
/&GetOptions( \%parms, 'to_file=s', 'voice=s', 'volume=s', 'pitch=s', 
'rate=s' );/
/my $text = shift @ARGV;/

/if (defined $parms{voice}) {/
/   $text = "<voice name='" . $parms{voice} . "'>" . $text . "</voice>";/
/}/

/my $response = `$alexa_remote -d Everywhere -e 
speak:"<speak>$text</speak>"`;/


In mh.private.ini I have the following to specify the /Matthew /voice 
and allow use of the other Amazon Polly voices available in the en-US 
locale:

/# Alexa remote specific stuff/
/voice_text = program /usr/local/bin/alexa-remote.pl/
/voice_names =   female=>Joanna, male=>Matthew,  child=>Justin,   
child1=>Ivy,/
/                   Ivy=>Ivy, Joanna=>Joanna,  Kendra=>Kendra,/
/              Kimberly=>Kimberly, Salli=>Salli,     Joey=>Joey,/
/                Justin=>Justin, Kevin=>Kevin,  Matthew=>Matthew/
/speak_voice = Matthew/

Despite it's simplicity, it works really well, but obviously has a lot 
more capabilities. It should be straight forward to rewrite the 
functionality provided in alexa_remote_control.sh natively in Perl if 
desired.

In any case, hopefully someone may find this useful.

Cheers!
-Brian

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