An Automated Announcement System (or “AAAS”) is an idea for a system that can make scheduled announcements during an event when you are too busy to do it yourself.
This is an idea I was working on back around 2017 or so when I was one of the producers for Maker Faire Milwaukee. Each year the venue would have a PA system, and our venue manager would show us how to use it. It was typically a mic with an on/off switch attached to the front panel of a PA system ready to go. Pick up mic, turn it on, talk, turn it off. Simple, right?
The issue is that we always ran with a skeleton crew of just a few people, and we were always dealing with putting out fires or dealing with something important and would always forget to make announcements!
The other issue is that when you go live on a mic with 5,000 people listening you might not deliver your words smoothly… especially if you don’t have a script to read from… and who has time to write a script when things are one fire all around you?
So that’s where the idea of An Automated Announcement System came from.
The original idea was that I would create a schedule of announcements and then prerecord them all to audio files, then once we had a folder full of audio files we’d load them onto a Raspberry Pi with cron jobs to run a script to play the audio at the appropriate times.
The Raspberry Pi would have the audio output connected to the audio input of the PA system so it could just run in the background without any user intervention, and do the announcements for you.
Maybe the audio files would all have timestamps as names and one script would just run continually checking for a match of the current time and then play the file. That might be easier than scheduling a whole bunch of cron jobs. Heck there’s probably some super-simple unixy-system way to do it that. (If not maybe I should write one!?)
Anyway, that was my idea for An Automated Announcement System which never happened because I never had time to work on it and then in 2020 there was a global pandemic and Maker Faire was put on hold. Sigh.
Feel free to run with this idea if you like it!