Skip to main content

Atmos Can Finally Speak for Itself

· 3 min read
Erik Osterman
Erik Osterman
Founder @ Cloud Posse

Workflows now have a say step type that speaks a message out loud using text-to-speech — an audible cue for when a long-running workflow finishes or needs your attention, even after you've switched to another window. When no speech engine is available (or you're in CI), it degrades gracefully and prints the message instead, so the same workflow works everywhere.

The Problem​

Long-running workflows — a multi-stack terraform apply, a build pipeline, a vendoring sweep — often outlast your attention. You kick one off, switch to another window, and forget about it. The existing alert step rings the terminal bell, but a bell doesn't tell you what happened, and it's easy to miss.

People have worked around this by shelling out to say on macOS, but that breaks the moment a teammate runs the same workflow on Linux or in CI, where say doesn't exist.

The Solution​

A new say step speaks its content aloud and works across platforms:

workflows:
  deploy:
    steps:
      - name: apply
        type: atmos
        command: terraform apply vpc

      - name: notify
        type: say
        content: "Deployment to {{ .steps.env.value }} is complete"

Under the hood it detects an available speech engine per OS — macOS say, Linux spd-say/espeak/espeak-ng, and Windows PowerShell's System.Speech — so the same workflow runs unchanged on any machine.

Pick a voice, font-family style​

Voice names are platform-specific, so voice is an ordered list — just like a CSS font-family stack. The first voice actually installed on the host wins; if none match, the engine's default is used:

      - name: notify
        type: say
        content: "Build finished"
        voice: [Samantha, Microsoft Zira, en-us]   # macOS, Windows, Linux
        rate: normal                                # slow | normal | fast

That single list resolves to Samantha on macOS, Zira on Windows, and en-us (espeak) on Linux — no per-OS branching required.

Graceful degradation you control​

say only makes sense on an interactive workstation, so it never fails a workflow and never hangs CI. The print field decides what happens when speech is (or isn't) available:

  • fallback (default) — speak when possible; otherwise print the message as a Markdown blockquote so the information is never lost.
  • always — always print the blockquote and also speak when possible.
  • never — speak when possible; otherwise stay silent.

In CI, or on any host with no speech engine, say automatically prints instead of speaking — so you can leave say steps in workflows that run both locally and in pipelines.

Try It​

A new examples/say-something/ example demonstrates voices, rates, print policies, and composing say into a build pipeline:

cd examples/say-something

atmos workflow notify -f say        # speak a completion message
atmos workflow voices -f say        # cross-platform voice stack
atmos workflow print-modes -f say   # the three print policies
atmos workflow pipeline -f say      # announce each build milestone

The cross-platform plumbing lives in a reusable pkg/say package, mirroring the existing browser-opening abstraction, so other parts of Atmos can adopt audible notifications too.

Get Involved​

Add a say step to the end of your slowest workflows and let Atmos tell you when it's done. Feedback and ideas are welcome on GitHub.