How to make python wait until the previous task is finished? - python

Hi I am experimenting with Speech Synthesis on mac, and I always put while loops in my programs so that I can use them until I decide to stop, and with this code, it repeats "What would you like me to say?" At the same time it says whatever I tell it to say.
from Cocoa import NSSpeechSynthesizer
while 1==1
sp = NSSpeechSynthesizer.alloc().initWithVoice_(None)
sp.startSpeakingString_("What would you like me to say?")
say_1 = raw_input("What would you like me to say?")
sp.startSpeakingString_(say_1)
Can someone tell me how to tell python to wait until it is done saying what I tell it to?

It seems you are looking for NSSpeechSynthesizer instance method: isSpeaking. You can write a polling loop to test if it is speaking and continue to work once it is not anymore. Something like this:
import time
from Cocoa import NSSpeechSynthesizer
while 1:
sp = NSSpeechSynthesizer.alloc().initWithVoice_(None)
sp.startSpeakingString_("What would you like me to say?")
say_1 = raw_input("What would you like me to say?")
sp.startSpeakingString_(say_1)
while sp.isSpeaking(): # loop until it finish to speak
time.sleep(0.9) # be nice with the CPU
print 'done speaking'
UPDATE: Is better time.sleep than continue inside the loop. The latter will waste a lot of CPU and battery (as pointed out by #kindall).
Hope this helps!

The problem is that the speech API does the speaking asynchronously. I don't know anything about this particular API, but to get this code working you'd have to poll in a loop or find an argument that specifies that your call should block. This issue is specifically connected to way this API works.
For this task, assuming you're using a Mac, you could use the command line instead. This will wait for the speech to finish before continuing.
import subprocess
def say(text):
subprocess.call(["say", text])
print("Before")
say("Wait for me!")
print("After")

Related

I created a python bind for CS:GO with pyautogui but it doesnt work

I created a simple bind script. It works on IDLE Python but it doesn't work in CS:GO. Do you know why?
Mayby it must be on background to work?
import keyboard
import pyautogui
import time
def EventListen():
while True:
try:
if keyboard.is_pressed('n'):
pyautogui.press('`')
pyautogui.typewrite('say EZ')
pyautogui.press('enter')
pyautogui.press('`')
EventListen()
except:
EventListen()
EventListen()
I don't see the need to use pyautogui since you are already using keyboard which is sufficient to perform the tasks you need. I have made some changes to your code
import time
import keyboard
def EventListen():
while True:
try:
if keyboard.is_pressed('n'):
keyboard.press('`')
keyboard.write('say EZ')
keyboard.press('enter')
keyboard.press('`')
elif keyboard.is_pressed('/'): #add something to end the process
break
except:
EventListen()
time.sleep(0.001)
EventListen()
There is no need to call the function in the while loop, as it will anyway be executed infinitely unless you kill the process. I don't see why the script wouldn't run in the background, in fact I am typing this
n`say EZ
`
using the script. What might be possible is that your previous program ran continuously, causing high CPU usage which might have competed with the game's demand. I recomend you to add a small delay before every iteration of the while loop, in this case I have added 1 ms delay, which will cause significant reduction in CPU usage. I am not sure if that solved your problem as I am unable to reproduce your exact case, let me know if it helped.
EDIT : I forgot to mention, I have added another binding of keyboard.is_pressed('/') which will make the program break out of the loop and hence terminate it when / key is pressed. You can change this as you like. If you don't want any other binding as such (which I don't recommend) then you can rely on manually killing the task.
you should make an exe with pyinstaller and you run it background

Hide cursor when a specific program is running

I'm checking if the game is active and If it is I'm trying to hide the mouse cursor just for comfort reasons since it annoys me. But I can't find any way to do it... Any suggestions? I'm pretty new to Python.
import psutil
def isRunning(name):
for pid in psutil.pids():
prcs = psutil.Process(pid)
if name in prcs.name():
return True
while(isRunning("Brawlhalla")):
# do stuff here
You could do this using an external program. If you are under Linux, check unclutter (https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/x11/unclutter for example - if you are using ubuntu).
This answer lists other ways to hide the mouse cursor more or less permanently.
By the way this is not strictly speaking a Python question, and using a python script is probably not the proper way to achieve what you want... You'd better launch unclutter or one of its friends from a console and be done with it.
But assuming you really insist on using Python and your isRunning() code is correct, one naive way to implement what you want in python could look like this (leaving aside corner cases handling):
from time import sleep
import subprocess
(your isRunning code here)
proc = subprocess.Popen(["unclutter", "-root", "-idle", "0"])
while (isRunning("Brawlhalla")):
sleep(1)
proc.terminate()

How to have input while a while loop ( or similar) is executed

I do believe that thread may accomplish this, although I am not sure. Most of the threads out there that address this problem doesn't address it to match my problem. I have created a simple mud-like fighting system that executes when you 'fight' an NPC. I have the code that runs under a while loop that checks health between you and NPC and if one of you dies then the loop ends.
However
During the loop I want to have it where a user can type in commands, instead of being stuck watching a looping code block without you being able to do anything. From what I have read online it looks like thread module may be of some help to me? Also if anyone has PyGame experience, maybe looking into that would be a solution? Please let me know what you think.
Below is a very simple example of what I am trying to accomplish.
import time
fighting = True
while fighting:
# do the magic here
time.sleep(4) # to give it a nice even pace between loop intervals
Although at any time i want to be able do input a command like a skill or spell.
Any ideas or suggestions?
You can separate your human interface and fight game into separate threads. The fight game uses a queue for input, which uses a timeout to continue. Here is a very simple queue structure that should minimally do what you want.
import time
import threading
import Queue
def fighter(input_queue):
while True:
start = time.time()
# do stuff
wait = time.time() - start()
if wait <= 0.0:
wait = 0
try:
msg = input_queue.get(wait, wait)
if msg == 'done':
return
# do something else with message
except Queue.Empty:
pass
def main():
input_queue = Queue.Queue()
fight_thread = threading.Thread(target=fighter, args=(input_queue,))
fight_thread.start()
while True:
msg = raw_input('hello ') # py 2.x
input_queue.put(msg)
if msg == 'done':
break
fight_thread.join()
If you only want this to work on Windows, and you want to keep your simple event loop:
fighting = True
inputbuf = ''
while fighting:
# do the magic here
while msvcrt.khbit():
newkey = msvcrt.getwche()
inputbuf += newkey
if newkey == '\r':
process_command(inputbuf)
inputbuf = ''
time.sleep(4) # to give it a nice even pace between loop intervals
On the other hand, if you want to use a background thread, it would be a lot simpler:
def background():
for line in sys.stdin:
process_command(line)
bt = threading.Thread(target=background)
bt.start
fighting = True
while fighting:
# do the magic here
time.sleep(4) # to give it a nice even pace between loop intervals
This works cross-platform, and it gives normal line-buffered input (including full readline support), which people will probably like.
However, I'm assuming you want that process_command to share information with the # do the magic here code, and possibly even to set fighting = False. If you do that without any thread synchronization, it will no longer work cross-platform. (It may work on both Windows CPython and Unix CPython, but will probably not work on IronPython or Jython—or, worse, it will work most of the time but randomly fail just often enough that you have to fix it but not often enough that you can debug it…)
What you may be looking for is a non-blocking raw_input implementation. This would allow the loop to keep going while allowing the user a possibility at entering commands.
There is an example of an implementation of this here and here. Maybe you can adapt one of them to suit your purpose.
Edit:
Or, if you're working on Windows...

developing for modularity & reusability: how to handle While True loops?

I've been playing around with the pybluez module recently to scan for nearby Bluetooth devices. What I want to do now is extend the program to also find nearby WiFi client devices.
The WiFi client scanner will have need to have a While True loop to continually monitor the airwaves. If I were to write this as a straight up, one file program, it would be easy.
import ...
while True:
client = scan()
print client['mac']
What I want, however, is to make this a module. I want to be able to reuse it later and, possible, have others use it too. What I can't figure out is how to handle the loop.
import mymodule
scan()
Assuming the first example code was 'mymodule', this program would simply print out the data to stdout. I would want to be able to use this data in my program instead of having the module print it out...
How should I code the module?
I think the best approach is going to be to have the scanner run on a separate thread from the main program. The module should have methods that start and stop the scanner, and another that returns the current access point list (using a lock to synchronize). See the threading module.
How about something pretty straightforward like:
mymodule.py
import ...
def scanner():
while True:
client = scan()
yield client['mac']
othermodule.py
import mymodule
for mac in mymodule.scanner():
print mac
If you want something more useful than that, I'd also suggest a background thread as #kindall did.
Two interfaces would be useful.
scan() itself, which returned a list of found devices, such that I could call it to get an instantaneous snapshot of available bluetooth. It might take a max_seconds_to_search or a max_num_to_return parameter.
A "notify on found" function that accepted a callback. For instance (maybe typos, i just wrote this off the cuff).
def find_bluetooth(callback_func, time_to_search = 5.0):
already_found = []
start_time = time.clock()
while 1:
if time.clock()-start_time > 5.0: break
found = scan()
for entry in found:
if entry not in already_found:
callback_func(entry)
already_found.append(entry)
which would be used by doing this:
def my_callback(new_entry):
print new_entry # or something more interesting...
find_bluetooth(my_callback)
If I get your question, you want scan() in a separate file, so that it can be reused later.
Create utils.py
def scan():
# write code for scan here.
Create WiFi.py
import utils
def scan_wifi():
while True:
cli = utils.scan()
...
return

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Programmers

Is there anyway to encorporate Dragon NaturallySpeaking into an event driven program? My boss would really like it if I used DNS to record user voice input without writing it to the screen and saving it directly to XML. I've been doing research for several days now and I can not see a way for this to happen without the (really expensive) SDK, I don't even know that it would work then.
Microsoft has the ability to write a (Python) program where it's speech recognizer can wait until it detects a speech event and then process it. It also has the handy quality of being able to suggest alternative phrases to the one that it thinks is the best guess and recording the .wav file for later use. Sample code:
spEngine = MsSpeech()
spEngine.setEventHandler(RecoEventHandler(spEngine.context))
class RecoEventHandler(SpRecoContext):
def OnRecognition(self, StreamNumber, StreamPosition, RecognitionType, Result):
res = win32com.client.Dispatch(Result)
phrase = res.PhraseInfo.GetText()
#from here I would save it as XML
# write reco phrases
altPhrases = reco.Alternates(NBEST)
for phrase in altPhrases:
nodePhrase = self.doc.createElement(TAG_PHRASE)
I can not seem to make DNS do this. The closest I can do-hickey it to is:
while keepGoing == True:
yourWords = raw_input("Your input: ")
transcript_el = createTranscript(doc, "user", yourWords)
speech_el.appendChild(transcript_el)
if yourWords == 'bye':
break
It even has the horrible side effect of making the user say "new-line" after every sentence! Not the preferred solution at all! Is there anyway to make DNS do what Microsoft Speech does?
FYI: I know the logical solution would be to simply switch to Microsoft Speech but let's assume, just for grins and giggles, that that is not an option.
UPDATE - Has anyone bought the SDK? Did you find it useful?
Solution: download Natlink - http://qh.antenna.nl/unimacro/installation/installation.html
It's not quite as flexible to use as SAPI but it covers the basics and I got almost everything that I needed out of it. Also, heads up, it and Python need to be downloaded for all users on your machine or it won't work properly and it works for every version of Python BUT 2.4.
Documentation for all supported commands is found under C:\NatLink\NatLink\MiscScripts\natlink.txt after you download it. It's under all the updates at the top of the file.
Example code:
#make sure DNS is running before you start
if not natlink.isNatSpeakRunning():
raiseError('must start up Dragon NaturallySpeaking first!')
shutdownServer()
return
#connect to natlink and load the grammer it's supposed to recognize
natlink.natConnect()
loggerGrammar = LoggerGrammar()
loggerGrammar.initialize()
if natlink.getMicState() == 'off':
natlink.setMicState('on')
userName = 'Danni'
natlink.openUser(userName)
#natlink.waitForSpeech() continuous loop waiting for input.
#Results are sent to gotResultsObject method of the logger grammar
natlink.waitForSpeech()
natlink.natDisconnect()
The code's severely abbreviated from my production version but I hope you get the idea. Only problem now is that I still have to returned to the mini-window natlink.waitForSpeech() creates to click 'close' before I can exit the program safely. A way to signal the window to close from python without using the timeout parameter would be fantastic.

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