Voice Announcements and Commands through ISY & Elk

[deirwin]

Does anybody have voice announcements working well or creatively with their ISY and Elk system? I would like to hear the time if i push a button on remote. It would be nice to hear status of a given room or sone upon command. Of course it would be great to say what you want out loud - does anybody on this forum have any of these operating? I have Elk M1G and ISY 99ir pro, plus Elk's speaker/mic combos throughout.

[sanders2222]

Ditto on that. And I'd like my house to wake me in the morning with "Good morning James, time to start the day..." along with the weather update instead of my clock radio.

[apostolakisl]

You can record your own custom voice messages on the Elk. They make an adapter to do that or, I believe, you can use a phone to do it withtout the adapter. Then you can put together any 6 word phrase you want. I heard some people had a bug where the Elk overwrote the default words when making custom words, so be careful.

 

As far as getting ISY to call that phrase, you either have to use the network module and do some fancing programming, or use a dummy Insteon/x10 command to trigger it (how I would do it), or, wait for UD guys to finish the Elk module.

[brad77]

Personally, I have set up my ELK/ISY to say a few things, but it takes a lot of work. Check out this thread for details. Please note that some URL's are broken. Updated URL's are further down in the thread. You'll also need a customer login to the Elk support site.

 

Most of the announcements are in anticipation for UDI's impending ELK release as they rely on security status changes.

 

However, if you want a keypad press to trigger an announcement and are willing to figure it out, you can set up network resources for the announcement itself and then use an ISY program to trigger the network resource based on the button/paddle press.

 

Once figured out, it's actually pretty cool. The ELK has a pretty large vocabulary and you can make it say quite a bit through the ISY.