There are times when our contextual smart home needs to speak to us. It can do this by sending a notification in text form but, sometimes we also need it to make a voice announcement in one or more rooms or zones. For this to happen, we need to be able to convert the text to an audio file with spoken text.
Whilst we could use a cloud service to achieve this, we will run into problems if the Internet connection is not up. To get around this issue, we use the cloud service if it is available and a local TTS capability if it is not. The preference for using a cloud based service is simply because the quality is much better.
