community.windows.win_say – Text to speech module for Windows to speak messages and optionally play sounds

Note

This plugin is part of the community.windows collection (version 1.8.0).

You might already have this collection installed if you are using the ansible package. It is not included in ansible-core. To check whether it is installed, run ansible-galaxy collection list.

To install it, use: ansible-galaxy collection install community.windows.

To use it in a playbook, specify: community.windows.win_say.

Synopsis

  • Uses .NET libraries to convert text to speech and optionally play .wav sounds. Audio Service needs to be running and some kind of speakers or headphones need to be attached to the windows target(s) for the speech to be audible.

Parameters

Parameter

Comments

end_sound_path

path

Full path to a .wav file containing a sound to play after the text has been spoken.

Useful on conference calls to alert other speakers that ansible has finished speaking.

msg

string

The text to be spoken.

Use either msg or msg_file.

Optional so that you can use this module just to play sounds.

msg_file

path

Full path to a windows format text file containing the text to be spoken.

Use either msg or msg_file.

Optional so that you can use this module just to play sounds.

speech_speed

integer

How fast or slow to speak the text.

Must be an integer value in the range -10 to 10.

-10 is slowest, 10 is fastest.

Default: 0

start_sound_path

path

Full path to a .wav file containing a sound to play before the text is spoken.

Useful on conference calls to alert other speakers that ansible has something to say.

voice

string

Which voice to use. See notes for how to discover installed voices.

If the requested voice is not available the default voice will be used. Example voice names from Windows 10 are Microsoft Zira Desktop and Microsoft Hazel Desktop.

Notes

Note

  • Needs speakers or headphones to do anything useful.

  • To find which voices are installed, run the following Powershell commands.

    Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Speech $speech = New-Object -TypeName System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer $speech.GetInstalledVoices() | ForEach-Object { $_.VoiceInfo } $speech.Dispose()

  • Speech can be surprisingly slow, so it’s best to keep message text short.

See Also

See also

community.windows.win_msg

The official documentation on the community.windows.win_msg module.

community.windows.win_toast

The official documentation on the community.windows.win_toast module.

Examples

- name: Warn of impending deployment
  community.windows.win_say:
    msg: Warning, deployment commencing in 5 minutes, please log out.

- name: Using a different voice and a start sound
  community.windows.win_say:
    start_sound_path: C:\Windows\Media\ding.wav
    msg: Warning, deployment commencing in 5 minutes, please log out.
    voice: Microsoft Hazel Desktop

- name: With start and end sound
  community.windows.win_say:
    start_sound_path: C:\Windows\Media\Windows Balloon.wav
    msg: New software installed
    end_sound_path: C:\Windows\Media\chimes.wav

- name: Text from file example
  community.windows.win_say:
    start_sound_path: C:\Windows\Media\Windows Balloon.wav
    msg_file: AppData\Local\Temp\morning_report.txt
    end_sound_path: C:\Windows\Media\chimes.wav

Return Values

Common return values are documented here, the following are the fields unique to this module:

Key

Description

message_text

string

The text that the module attempted to speak.

Returned: success

Sample: “Warning, deployment commencing in 5 minutes.”

voice

string

The voice used to speak the text.

Returned: success

Sample: “Microsoft Hazel Desktop”

voice_info

string

The voice used to speak the text.

Returned: when requested voice could not be loaded

Sample: “Could not load voice TestVoice, using system default voice”

Authors

  • Jon Hawkesworth (@jhawkesworth)