The kitchen can actually hear it: a voice, real pauses, and no gesture

[sridharkalaibala]

Follow-up to #837, prompted by two questions from the owner - and one of the three fixes here is the one that would otherwise have kept the speaker silent.

"little pause between line items"

The announcement was one sentence with full stops in it. A full stop is a shorter gap than a kitchen needs, so it is now one utterance per line:

Table 5, new order.
One Chicken Biryani.
One Chicken Tikka Masala.

A speech engine leaves a real gap between utterances - long enough to hold one dish in your head before the next arrives.

"its indian english. not so fluent"

An American voice reads biryani, paneer and kuzhambu like somebody who has never ordered one. Windows ships en-IN voices (Heera, Ravi), so one is preferred where the machine has it, then en-GB, then any English.

Chosen once and remembered: getVoices() fills in asynchronously, and asking per ticket is how the first announcement of a service comes out in the wrong accent. It also listens for onvoiceschanged, because asking at load usually returns an empty list.

The one nobody asked about, and the one most likely to have broken it

Chromium refuses to play audio until somebody has interacted with the page.

On a counter till that is invisible - it is clicked all day. On the machine at the pass it is the whole problem: it sits untouched for hours, which is exactly when a ticket needs announcing, and the chime would have been refused with nothing in any log to say why.

app.commandLine.appendSwitch('autoplay-policy', 'no-user-gesture-required');

Set before the app is ready, because afterwards it is ignored.

A correction

I also claimed the script only loaded on one page of ten and "fixed" that. It was not a defect: dashboard is not a screen, it is the shell the 57 modules run inside, so it was already loading everywhere that matters. The change was reverted rather than left in as churn.

Tests

21 pass, including two new ones on the line-at-a-time behaviour.

They still do not cover the speaker or the voice. That needs the kitchen machine, the Bluetooth speaker and one real ticket - and until that happens nobody should assume this works.

[github-actions]

Merged to develop. Anyone can test this - you do not need write access.

Try it at https://develop.posnic.io, or run it yourself:

git fetch origin develop && git checkout develop
npm install && npm --prefix api install
npm run dev   # then http://localhost:3000

When you have tested it, say what you did and what happened, and set
QA passed or QA failed. If you cannot set labels, just comment -
a maintainer will.

Reporting that something is broken is as useful as fixing it. It is
better found here than by a shopkeeper.