Speaking Display Clock

'At the third stroke, it will be ...'

Recalling the days of BT's speaking clock telephone service (dial '123'), I created this simple 'speaking display clock' computer program. The display clock displays the time in 24-hour (military time) format while audio-announcing in 12-hour format. This is deliberate, to demonstrate the two formats. It is an uncompiled—source code—BASH (the Linux operating system shell) shell script, so you can read through the program and see exactly how it works and, therefore, what it does.

The program could be developed in numerous ways, such as:

• 12-hour display of time, with 'AM' and 'PM' visual and audio indications;
• 24-hour clock (military time) audio announcements (24-hour clock times can be phrased in various ways, such as, for midnight, 'Double-oh double-oh' or 'Zero hour', and hours can be announced followed by the word 'hours', such as 'Twenty-three hours' or 'Twenty-three hundred hours'. I've included a number of audio clips to cater to those requirements);
• display of and announcement of date;
• alternative audio clips, such as humourous ones, such as the sound of a duck quacking instead of the pips;
• alarm clock functionality;
• countdown/up timer functionality;
• enhancing the display with borders, etc

System requirements: suitable operating system (eg: Linux running natively or under a virtual machine) or emulation environment (eg: Cygwin); BASH shell/interpreter; sox to play the audio time announcements (previously, it was aplay).

This script is not intended to act as a screensaver. It does not lock the display. While the script is running, it is not practical to continue to use the virtual console/graphical terminal the script's time is displayed on.

Speaking Display Clock by Gary Hayward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.