[Festival + Fbcmd = Tts Facebook Stream]

fbcmd is a command line interface for Facebook (Probably deserves a segment!). Yesterday I saw the HakTip about Festival, a free TTS engine for Linux. I knew the two needed to be combined, so I made a bash script that reads out the latest post from your Facebook stream!

(Skip to the bottom for the completed script)

You Will Need:

Festival

fbcmd

Getting Festival

$ sudo apt-get install festival

Getting FBCMD

Follow the instructions here http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/installation

How I started (aka the one line version)

fbcmd stream 0 1 | grep -v [#] | cut -d "]" -f 2- | festival --tts --pipe

fbcmd stream 0 1

"fbcmd stream" gives you the latest 10 updates from your stream. The first argument is the "importance" level of the updates to be output, 0 means show all. The second argument is the number of updates to show.

It also outputs a header row with column labels, we don't need this so....

grep -v [#]

grep -v outputs everything except lines that contain the argument. In this case "[#]". If you look at the usual output of "fbcmd stream" it is a numbered list with a header row, the header row contains [#], which is unlikely to appear in anyone's status.

cut -d "]" -f 2-

In this case, cut is being used to take off the first few characters of the output (The numbering column). I don't think this is strictly the way cut is meant to be used, if anyone has a better way, let me know!

festival --tts --pipe

Uses TTS to read out everything that is piped into it!

But I've already heard that update! (aka. the long version)

After I got all this working, I thought it would be better to only read out the update if it hadn't been read before (So it could be used on a timer, to give updates once a minute for example, but only if there is a new one)

#!/bin/bash
# Gets latest update from Facebook stream
echo `fbcmd stream 0 1 | grep -v [#]` >> .facebook1

# Check to see if script has been run before
if [ -a .facebook2 ]	
	then
# If it has it checks to see if this status is different	
	FILE1=`cat .facebook1`	
	FILE2=`cat .facebook2`	
	if [ "$FILE1" == "$FILE2" ]	
     then	
     festival --tts .facebook1
	fi
else	
	festival --tts .facebook1
fi
# Moves status to a secondary file to be checked next time
mv .facebook1 .facebook2

Ending stuff

I'm not very advanced at bash script writing, so creative criticism is welcomed!

Have a look at what you can do with fbcmd, the script could easily be modified to read out notifications etc instead.

[Episode 8x02]

Didn't catch the sideways Snubs one, probably due to my viewing angle, but I did get a smile out of the hex one when I decoded it.