Talking clock voice: build your own speaking clock in any voice
A talking clock tells the time out loud: every hour, at the press of a button, or at a set time each day. Ready-made clocks come with one built-in voice. If you want the time read by a narrator, a cartoon character or the voice of someone in your family, you can build one yourself.
This guide shows how to voice every time of day once with the free SuperClonica engine and how to play the right file on a Raspberry Pi or any Linux computer, with no internet and no subscription.
Voice every time once
A day has 1,440 minutes, so 1,440 short files cover every possible time; for hourly announcements 24 are enough. Write each time in words the way it should sound, for example “It is seven oh five” or “It is half past nine”, so the voice never has to guess how to read 07:05. Install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and, in Python, after from superclonica import Superclonica, tts = Superclonica(), then for h in range(24) and m in range(60): text = words(h, m); audio, rate = tts.synthesize(text, voice="voice.json", lang="en", seed=4); tts.save(f"{h:02d}{m:02d}.wav", audio), where words is a small function you write for your language. A fixed seed keeps the voice the same in every file.
Play the right file every hour
On a Raspberry Pi or any Linux computer with a speaker, the cron scheduler can play the file for the current time. A crontab line such as 0 * * * * aplay /home/pi/clock/$(date +\%H\%M).wav speaks the time at the start of every hour. In a crontab, the percent sign must be written as \% because cron otherwise turns it into a new line. For a button, run the same aplay command from a script that the button starts.
Pick the voice
Try voices free on their pages with one time announcement, 30 to 100 characters, no account needed: a calm narrator for a bedside clock, a character voice for a children’s room. For a clock in the voice of a family member, record 5 to 10 seconds of their clear speech with their consent and train the voice in the studio; training on your own NVIDIA graphics card is free.
Clocks in other languages
The engine speaks 31 languages; Chinese is not supported yet. Each language says the time differently: Russian changes the word for hours and minutes with the number, German says “halb acht” for 7:30, and Japanese uses 時 and 分. Write the time words for your language in the function and listen to a few files at different times before you voice the whole day.
When a ready-made clock is better
If someone needs to hear the time at any moment because of low vision, a ready talking clock or the screen reader of their phone is simpler and more reliable than a homemade setup. A custom talking clock is best as a hobby project, a gift with a familiar voice, or hourly announcements in a workshop, shop or classroom.