Get the current time

Goals

Our main goal was, to ask Rhasspy for the current time and made MaryTTS to read it aloud.
To increase the user experience, we wanted to get a polished and understandable text from Rhasspy.

Rhasspy

In Rhasspy we have to add new lines to the sentences.ini:

    [GetTime]
    wie spät ist es
    sag mir die uhrzeit

Example sentences

In this case we do not allow that much variation, since we mainly ask:
“Wie spät ist es?”

For this command we do not need any variables like MQTT-groups or anything else, so we do not need slots.

Node-Red

You can find the flow for this feature here.
(It is the same flow, we used for the alarm and the timer)

GetTime in Node-Red

We only need one function-node, which gets started by our “Intent-Switch”.
This function-node contains a script, which:

• gets the current time as ISO8601-String
• splits the string to separate hours, minutes and seconds
• adjust the time (+1 hour) to fit our timezone and makes sure, that it won’t exceed 24 hours
• shortens the minutes to one digit, if its under 10 (e.g. “09” -> “9”), to increase the user experience
• wraps the hours and minutes into an understandable string

    message = {};
    // Get Time and convertit to hours (time[0]) and minutes (time[1])
    time = new Date().toISOString();
    time = time.split("T")[1].split(".")[0];
    time = time.split(":");
    // Adjust time to our timezone and crops it to 24h
    time[0] = (parseInt(time[0])+1)
    if (time[0] >= 25){
        time[0] -=24;
    }
    // Adjust time to spell "9" instead of "09" 
    // and e.g. "12 Uhr" instead of "12 Uhr 0"
    time[1] = parseInt(time[1])
    if (time[1] === 0){
        time[1] = "";
    }
    // Create text to be spoken by MaryTTS
    message.payload = "Es ist " + time[0] + " Uhr " + time[1];
    return message;

Code of the function-node.

The function-node passes the created message to our main TTS-node.

What’s Next?

Set my alarm and wake me up!