Our game was set in the Aliens universe so we wanted to emulate the female voice from MU|TH|UR. None of the GMs are voice actors (or female) so I made a text to speech device for this.
I got quite far down the rabbit hole of power saving and solar charging on a Raspberry Pi 3A+ then somebody offered to bring a massive lead-acid battery to the game for me so I abandoned worrying about all that because brute force won out. I will come back to it though as I want to make a nice portable outdoor Pi to provide 'infrastructure' at future events. Having infrastructure I can deploy easily in a field with no power has been a constant thing I've been nibbling at the edges of for years mostly with ESP32s and mesh networking.
I put the Raspberry Pi 3A+ into a waterproof box I had and powered it off that big battery all weekend. I even forgot to shut it down on Saturday night and it jut kept going.
The Raspberry Pi communicated with the Internet over 4G using a dongle I had kicking around which conveniently has a tiny NAT router in and presents as a USB ethernet so 'just works' with zero configuration on the Pi, or pretty much anything else. I'll probably try find another dongle the same, it's handy for these reasons.
I then made a 'bot' in the popular messaging app Telegram using their example Python script and used the Microsoft Azure AI voice engine to generate a very convincing voice. This was not a very sophisticated script, really just Telegram's example bot script, their recipe for restricting access to certain Telegram IDs and Microsoft's example text-to-speech script all smushed together with my rudimentary understand of Python as I'm normally an Arduino/ESP32 C++ person.
None of this needs much processing power: an original Pi could probably do it, except the Microsoft library expects a 64-bit OS so the Raspberry Pi 3A+ was a good fit. It's the lowliest, most power efficient 64-bit Pi that also has an analogue audio out and I had one in my stash of dormant SBCs.
The end result was we could type a message on our phone into a Telegram group chat and it would then ring out across the game using walkie-talkies to broadcast it over a large area. There was a little bit of impedence/level matching needed for the line out from the Pi to go into the headset input of the walkie-talkie. I used voice activation in lieu of 'push-to-talk' but that too worked great once I added a preamble 'bong' and little gap before the talking. I may go back and investigate triggering the push-to-talk through the headset connector using one of the Pi GPIOs as it's more predictable and the headset has the feature: I was just bashing the thing together quickly for the game.
"You now have fifteen minutes to reach minimum safe distance"
If players wanted to talk to MU|TH|UR they would just talk on the same walkie-talkie channel and we were listening. We had some quite long player conversations back and forth with MU|TH|UR like this and it worked brilliantly. We'll be using this setup again.
