callmac_skill

Overview

This skill provides remote voice control for a Mac from mobile devices using messaging commands like /callmac or /voice. It generates mixed Chinese/English TTS with edge-tts and plays audio locally on macOS, supporting loops, volume, and scheduling. Use it to broadcast announcements, alarms, stories, or wake-up calls triggered from Telegram or WhatsApp.

How this skill works

The skill receives text commands from messaging apps and sends text (or SSML) to edge-tts for synthesis. It detects language segments, applies appropriate voices for English and Chinese, concatenates segments when needed, saves or streams MP3 files, and controls local playback on the Mac using afplay and osascript for volume. Playback can be looped, scheduled, or stopped on demand.

When to use it

• Broadcast announcements to a household or office from your phone
• Play alarms, wake-up calls, or scheduled reminders on a Mac
• Deliver bilingual messages that mix Chinese and English naturally
• Create and save TTS audio files for later playback or distribution
• Trigger looping playback for repeated alerts or background audio

Best practices

• Keep messages concise to avoid large automatic segmenting and long synthesis time
• Specify --voice-en and --voice-zh when you need consistent voice styles across messages
• Use SSML for precise timing, breaks, or emphasis in complex announcements
• Pre-generate frequently used audio files and schedule playback for reliability
• Test volume and mute state with osascript before deploying critical alerts

Example use cases

• Send /callmac "Good morning 爸爸妈妈" from Telegram to wake the household with a bilingual greeting
• Create a repeated safety alarm: generate TTS and play with --loops 10 and volume 90
• Generate bedtime stories remotely: synthesize long text to MP3 and play on loop for kids
• Schedule meeting reminders by saving an MP3 and adding a cron job to afplay it every 30 minutes
• Concatenate multilingual segments for polished public announcements on an office Mac