News

Goals

Our main goal was to be able to ask Heimdall for the news.
He should be able to:

• read some headlines
• give us more information about specific headlines

Rhasspy

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

[News]
lies mir die nachrichten vor
was gibt es für neue nachrichten
was gibt es neues

[NextNews]
weiter
zur nächsten nachricht

[MoreNews]
mehr
ich hätte gerne mehr (infos | informationen)

Example sentences

Some example sentences are:

    1. Lies mir die Nachrichten vor.
    2. Was gibt es Neues?
    
    3. Zur nächsten Nachricht.
    
    4. Ich hätte gerne mehr Infos.

Node-Red

You can find the flow for all functions of this feature here.

Update the news

We decided to use the RSS-Feed of the “Tagesschau”, because it is free and easy to use.

The nodes are used for:

• injection-node: runs the process every 15 minutes
• http-request-node: requests the RSS-Feed of the “Tagesschau”
• xml-node: converts the xml-file to json
• function-node: formats the json file and saves it

Read the news aloud

The link-out-node is connected to our main TTS-node.

The green section is used to get the headlines:

• function-node(left): setup an index and creates a beginning message for TTS
• function-node(top): adds a headline to the message/reads the titles of the news from the stored data
• function-node(bottom): increases the index/creates the end of the news block, if there are no news left
• switch-node: decides (based on the index) if the next headline should be read or if the feature should be stopped

The red section is used to control this feature:

• function-node: is connected to the Command-Request-Callback-Node (via the link-in-node) and filters incoming messages by source
• switch-node: switches by incoming intents (e.g. [NextNews], [Stop])

The blue section is used to get more information about a headline:

• function-node: reads the stored description of the headline and creates a TTS-message

The yellow section is used to handle wrong intents or [Stop]:

• function-node(top): creates TTS-message as feedback for the [Stop]
• function-node(bottom): creates TTS-message as feedback, if there was a wrong or unknown intent detected

Loop

The link-in-node is connected to our TTS-Callback-Node, the link-out-node is connected to the Command-Request-Node.

All TTS-messages in this feature, except the one for the [Stop] intent, are tagged with the source “news”.
We used this to create a loop to control the output.

The nodes are used for:

• function-node: filters by the source
• delay-node: delays the message by one second to prevent errors

Sources

Tagesschau Tagesschau-RSS

What’s Next?

You want to know how it works?
Look at our Tech-Stack!