Read a Story plugin - Anything new?

[Lola]

I tried the read a story plugin (readastory.uhp) and loved it.
Too bad I found out the hard way that Hal has a limitation on the size of the text files he could read.
While reading around the forum I found out that some members are trying to work on the issue. I wonder if anything new has been acomplished.

An increase on the length of the text files that Hal could read could be great gift for a future version of Hal. I'm crossing my fingers on the possibility of this to happen. []

[snowman]

Now Im not 100% on this but... I think that I know why large files cannot be read. It all has to do with the haptek player. However, I found a way around this but it requires Robert before it can be used in Hal.

JasonDude7116, the creator of your Read-a-Story plugin, decided to use a third-party piece of software (called BALABOLKA) that will read the story for you. If you look for Gretta Plugins here:
http://zabaware.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6278[ on the first post you'll find more information on it.

[Lola]

Thank soo much snowman! Great plugins in there, I got them all.

It is working great and serves my purposes well!

One constructive comment about the plugin that's probably overlooked its the following:
It is supposed to read stories, poems and songs and its story folder contains lots of each, good ones. But something seems to be overlooked with the songs:

Please read song list - - works perfect

Please read song (whatever) - not working an no command instructions on the menu options.

I just placed some of my song lyrics with the poems as a workaround and works fine.

I'm going to go ahead and try out the other plugins. Thanks again !!!
[]

[snowman]

I'm glad I could help. Jason is usually around here somewhere. You could always email him with the script error and He'll probably be happy to help.

[jasondude7116]

Gretta's "read a story" is seperate from Gretta's "sing a song".
if you are using the singing plugin then the command is "please sing (whateversongname)". you can edit the singing plugin (with notepad) and you can see the commands.

the singing plugin can use most SAPI4 voices (you need pitch abilities in the voice for it to work, and SAPI5 doesn't support this in the way that SAPI4 does). it is currently set-up to use microsoft's SAPI4 voice "peter". (i think it is also called "American male #1"). if you want to change the voice it uses then you need to edit the singing plugin (i think currently it is named "GRETTAsing" or something close to that) and look for "Peter" and change it to the name of the voice that you want to use.

to try to make myself clear...."GRETTAread" and "GRETTAsing" are two seperate plugins. there are some other instructions on the GRETTA plugins page.

http://www.zabaware.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6278

hope that helps...let me know.

[Lola]

Hello jasondude7116! You have really wonderful plugins that are very useful, thanks for sharing them with us!!!

I'm not using the singing plugin yet, the one I'm using is the read a story 2 (readastory.uhp) that comes with the new story folder 2.

I opened the folder and found 3 folders; for stories, poems and songs and each listing files.
I guessed that because poems and stories were to be read aloud the song folder was for lyrics to be read aloud as well. [:I]

So now I come to understand, that it is intended to hear Hal sing those songs when used with the other singing plugin.  Oh well, sorry I got super confused with it.

Everything is perfect then, and I'm doing the correct thing in putting my lyrics with the poems. After all, songs are like sung poems!

Thanks for your patience with me, in time I will get a hang of it!  
[]

[jasondude7116]

glad everything is working for you  []