Talking Twitter client

So I learnt this afternoon about this Linux utility called festival. It's a text to speech conversion program. Running it is as simple as

echo "Hello world" | festival --tts

Moreover, installing it on Fedora is as easy as

sudo yum install -y festival

After that, a bit of a bash and a bit of a python and I had a twit-to-speech utility running.

The code is simply this much:

#!/bin/bash

TWITTERURL="http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json"
JSON="/tmp/twittline.json"
SPEECH="/tmp/twt.message"
PYCODE="/tmp/twt2speech.py"

read -p "Username: " TUSER && \
read -sp "Password: " TPASS && \
curl -s -u $TUSER:$TPASS $TWITTERURL > $JSON

cat > $PYCODE << "EOF"
import json
import sys
import re
urlp="(https?|ftp|file)://[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-a-zA-Z0-9+&@#/%=~_|]"
twits = json.load(open(sys.argv[1]))
for twit in twits:
    text = twit['user']['name']+' says: '+twit['text']
    text = re.sub(urlp, '', text) 
    print text
EOF

python $PYCODE $JSON > $SPEECH

while read line
do
notify-send -t 15000 "$line"
echo $line | festival --tts
sleep 1
done < $SPEECH

echo "THE END" | festival --tts

code syntax highlighting by GVIM

The above script will ask your twitter credentials, fetch latest 20 twits in friends' timeline, save into a JSON file. A short python script parses the JSON, extracts twit text and user's name from it and outputs in a sanitized format (it removes URLs, because there is no use hearing them).

The sanitized output is  saved in another text file, which is piped one line at a time to festival. In case the speech is not clear, it also shows the text in a pop-up using notify-send.

A full script with some error checking can be found here.