In June I purchased my first MacBook Pro (I should really write about this sometime). One simple feature I really enjoy is that the machine will announce the time at the top of each hour. I don’t know why, I just really like that feature.
At work I am still on Microsoft Windows-based machines and wanted to have this same feature on them. So I did some digging around and found a VBScript that will do it. I added the code below to a sayhour.vbs file and set up as a scheduled task to run at the top of the hour. I have all my clocks showing 24 hour time so their is no need for AM or PM, which personally drives me batty anyway.
' Say the following hour Dim speaks, speech speaks= "It's " & hour(time) & " hours" set speech = CreateObject("sapi.spvoice") speech.Speak speaks
Spending so much time in PowerShell now I wanted to solve this same issue there. Again some looking around and digging in to the C# library SpeechSynthesizer I have a solution. This too will run from a scheduled task. The only part I have not been able to figure out is how to keep the cmd box to show when it runs. The below code is saved in a sayhour.ps1 file and set up as a schedule task to to run at the top of the hour.
# Say the following hour Add-Type -AssemblyName System.speech $speech = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer $speech.Speak("It's $((Get-Date).hour) hours")
I know have my machine at work saying the hour at the top of the hour. I quite like it.
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