Talking Moose

Lately I've been fooling around with Bluetooth speakers so I suggested that we take some of my daughters toys and make it talk. She was obviously very excited. Imagine if someone suggested this when you were a kid. I'd personally had gone nuts. Well, she chose her dear Moose. 

So I went to buy a cheap'n'small bluetooth speaker for 17 euros and we started by makingthe bluetooth speaker talk using the Mac's fabulous say command line tool. First we connected the Bluetooth speaker by fiddling with the Mac's Bluetooth preferences. After that, the speaker is ready to use. Now, when you type something like

    say "Hello world"

You'll hear speech from the bluetooth speaker. There's even a bunch of different voices available and you can add more from the Text-to-speech preferences. For the Finnish language, there's a nice voice called Mikko. To use a specific voice, you do like

    say -v Mikko "Huomenta Suomi!"

And it was fun, once again. We've played with the say command before, but now the sound comes from a different box, so it was even more fun. Even our 3-year-old made the box talk. She can type her own name and learning more words every day.

Then I suggested we break the bluetooth speaker to pieces, just for the heck of it. And sure we did. We found a lithium battery, a circuit board and a speaker element. And I do find my daughter to be much like me when I was a kid. I always broke things to pieces and usually was unable to put them back together. We, however succeeded also at putting the speaker back together too. And yes, we tried if it works when in pieces too.

Later today, she came back and asked whether we are going to make the moose talk. And we stuffed the speaker into the Moose's butt. Now it speaks. Through its butt. Great! We even added some velcro so that you can close the gap and hide the electronics. And open it to recharge the speaker via USB.

By the way, you can actually connect several bluetooth speakers to your Mac. And you can address each of the individually using the -a parameter of the say command. What this mean in practise is that you can make a theatrical play with several soft toys speaking (through their butts) with different voices, by programming! 

MUST BUY MOAR BLUETOOTH SPEAKERS!!!