2.212.1 Design goal: ¶

• Auditory icons should be used to provide additional feedback, not as a gimmick.
• The Emacsvox interface should be usable at all times with the icons turned off.
• Command emacsvox-toggle-icons toggles the use of auditory icons. This flag is buffer-local; use an interactive prefix argosy C-u to toggle auditory icons on/off globally.
• Use setq-default emacsvox-use-icons nil) to turn auditory icons off at startup; default is to use auditory icons globally.
• General principle for using auditory icons:
  1. Convey information about events taking place in parallel.
  2. For instance, if making a selection automatically moves the current focus to the next choice, We speak the next choice, while indicating the fact that something was selected with an auditory icon.
  3. Speed up task completion — auditory icons take less time than the accompanying spoken feedback.
• This module provides a mapping between names in the elisp world and actual sound files.
• icon names are symbols, sound files are strings — fully-qualified file-names.
• Modules that use auditory icons use icon names and not actual file names.
• Icons are played either using a local player, or by sending appropriate commands to the speech server (local or cloud).
• This is determined by the value of emacsvox-play-program.
• As of Emacsvox 13.0, this module defines a sound-pack architecture for auditory icons. Bundled packs live below sounds/packs/; personal packs live below ~/.emacsvox/sounds/packs/ by default.
• The bundled packs are chimes and 3d. Additional pack directories containing button.ogg, or a data-only emacsvox-sound-pack.el manifest, are discovered dynamically.
• Contrast this with prompts — they dont belong to any theme.

2.212.2 Designing Auditory Icons ¶

Here are some notes on what I have learnt while designing and using auditory icons over the years:

1. Auditory icons should be short — use command soxi or ; in a dired buffer to see duration of a sound file. Use the bundled themes as a guide.
2. Sounds have many properties, eg: duration, gain, pitch, at the basic level.
3. Even more important is the nature of the sound and what it sounds like in the context of the overall speech output where that sound is used.
4. This is why the gain of icons should never be normalized in my view— tuning icons is as complex as picking colors from a color palette.
5. The included themes have been optimized over years of use and are primarily tuned for using with headphones.

If emacsvox-play-program is set to nil, we serve icons, otherwise play them using a local player.

2.212.3 Emacsvox-Sounds Commands ¶

• emacsvox-sounds-select-theme
• emacsvox-toggle-icons

2.212.4 emacsvox-sounds Options ¶

Variable: User Option emacsvox-play-program ¶

Play program.
Pulse: For systems running Pipewire or Pulseaudio.
sox-play: For systems using SoX as the local player.
None: For systems that rely on the speech server playing the icon.

Default Value:

"/usr/bin/pactl"