Do you want to heara gentle vocal reminder that yet another hour has ebbed away?
Sometimes I do.
A simple voice that speaksto tell me the time is a handy, and passive, way to help keepmyself focused and avoid spendingtoo much time procrastinating (or watching too many Sonic speed runs on Twitch).
Obviously, I know that I could look at the clock in the Unity panel (pictured right).
But that requires me to remember to look. And if I’m engrossed readinga 34 page forum war…
How To Enable aTalking Clock on UbuntuI can’t speak for windows but I do know it’s a piece of cake to get macOS to speak the time on the hour. There’s a simple check-boxoption in the system settings area.
I couldn’t find anything similar in Ubuntu, not that’s available to enable out-of-the-box. So I turned to Github.
One search term, ashort scroll and a quickclick was all it took to find the followingsimple app on Github that caters specifically to this need.
Theimaginativelycalled ‘ Talking Clock ‘ is a simple bash script that isrun from the command line (and which youcould set to launchat startup, etc).
Itlets you setthe interval(s) atUbuntu speaksthe time out loud, though unlike macOS you don’t get to pick froma variety of human-sounding voices.
With ‘talking-clock’ you can getthe default linux computerized voice to announcethe time on the hour, on the half hour, on the quarter hour, or at every five minute interval.
Just setthe option you want when running it using the -t command followed by either the 5, 15 or 30. It announces hourly by default.
When you’re
fed updone with it just pass the scriptthe -s flag to make it shut up.
Want to try it? You can download Talking Clock from its Github pagebelow.
Talking Clock on Github
To use it first, extract the archive. Next, navigate into the ‘source’ folder from the command line and runthe ‘talking-clock’ script.