Asked
— Edited
Resolved by CochranRobotics!
Hi guys.
I need a little help with an RSS feed script and hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
Question one.
Is there a way to have an RSS feed to be spoken through the EZB4 instead of through the PC's sound card as I haven't seen a "SpeakRSSEZB() script function?
Question 2.
I am looking for a way to insert something similar to a "Sleep()" function in-between each RSS feed in the script below with a 2 second gap between each feed read.
SpeakRSS("http://feeds.skynews.com/feeds/rss/uk.xml",1)
SpeakRSS("http://feeds.skynews.com/feeds/rss/uk.xml",2)
SpeakRSS("http://feeds.skynews.com/feeds/rss/uk.xml",3)
SpeakRSS("http://feeds.skynews.com/feeds/rss/uk.xml",4)
The "Sleep() script function is not a viable option as the length of the feeds spoken change length from day to day (or hour to hour) so I need something like a "SayWait() but not sure what or where to put the correct function in to my script.
Many thanks.
Steve G. 
@d.cochran if you are outputting to the pc speakers using the say command should you use saywait instead?
that way you don't have to put the sleep in there...
Agreed. I think this was one of my first scripts for ARC. Lot of options. This one worked and I moved on to trying other parts of ARC. I wrote all of this before getting my first ez-b. The sleep is there to give it a pause though and not to really wait for something to be said. I wanted it to look like it was thinking a bit.
I wrote this more to clean up the RSS feed than anything, but it would work for the need posted in this thread to allow the user to speak an RSS feed through the EZ-B along with cleaning up a bunch of the junk that is in RSS Feeds. This doesn't get everything, but does get an estimated 95% of the garbage out of the feeds that I tried it with. This was another thing that I was going to do with making it database driven. I was going to specify which parts of the regex and cleanup were needed for each feed in the database table. Another thing that could be done is to make it to accept parameters that would allow you to call one exe and pass in the feed. Because the file is cleaned up after it is read, you could use one exe and one text file.
Lots of ideas in my head but I just haven't had the time to put them into action. I had also though about having a student complete this when I got into the programming level of the course that I am teaching. It would be a good project for someone to work on, but by the time I get to that point, I am sure it wont be needed because it will be in ARC anyway
Another thing that I would add is to disable the speech recognition at the beginning of the script and enabling it at the end.
Thanks for your responses guys, much appreciated and sorry for the late reply. Had a crisis of my own to deal with today.
Quick question. How or where do I use the first set of code in post #8? Never used any programming code like C# so not sure what to do with it.
@Steve G,
Yes, that is C# code. You can download a free version of Visual Studio from Microsoft to compile the code into programs.
Alan
if you want, send me the list of RSS feeds that you want to use and I will build multiple exe's for you to call from your script. I can test them to make sure things work as you need them to. I might not be able to get to it until early next week due to going out of town with family, but I would be willing to help you there.
It would be good for you to get C# downloaded and installed and attempt to do it yourself just so that you can learn from this. I will help you there also.
Thanks very much for the offer @d.cochran. I will try it out myself first to see if I can get my head around it, but if I get stuck I will give you a shout with the feeds.
sounds like a plan. Good luck and let me know if you need anything.