Thanks to a blog by Jefferey Hicks about an alarm clock in powershell using the PC speaker, I thought it would be nice to tweak that script a little bit and use Microsoft’s text to speech engine so you can use the alarm and let a voice wake you through your headphones or speakers.
To enable the engine, I believe you need .NET 4 on your system and you need powershell version 2 or higher. But if you use Windows 8.1 (or higher; thus powershell 4 or higher) the engine is a lot better and will talk with a reasonably natural voice. All you need is 2 lines of code to reference to the text to speech engine and create an object.
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.speech
$Speak = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
Now you can use that object to say something by using $Speak.Speak(“Something”), to which you can either pass a string or an array.
All the credit for this script goes to Jefferey Hicks (as mentioned above), I only replaced the pc speaker part of his script with the code for the text to speech engine and maybe some of you know the reference to the first part of what’s being said… And I guess that a lot of you will know the the last line.
You can find my version of the script here: Alarm.ps1
Just run it with the -NapTime parameter and the amount of minutes to count down from.
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