General

Create Cortana Audio Files From Text Using PowerShell

Aaron Rothstein · July 17, 2017 · 2 Comments

Use Windows 10’s Text-to-Speech capability and Cortana’s voice to create WAV audio from within a PowerShell script.

Finding a Universal Voice: A Universal Problem

Have you ever called a support line and had to listen to a bunch of different recorded scripts, also known as “prompts”? The prompts may be the voice of a single person or a combination of different people (maybe the original voice left the company). There may be feedback noise on the recording. The speaker may have tripped over a word but decided not to record the prompt over again. Maybe the speaker had a cold one the day of recording. All of these factors can create an inconsistent user experience when interacting with the call prompts. If that weren’t enough, it takes TIME to record prompts manually! The more you have the longer it will take, even if you get every recording right on the first try.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to audio files with a consistent voice, and in an efficient manner? We can, with PowerShell and Windows 10’s Text-to-Speech capability, powered by the .NET class SpeechSynthesizer.

Change DNS Servers for Computers with Static IP Addresses

Aaron Rothstein · March 27, 2017 · 8 Comments

DNS Server Settings Screenshot — Update DNS servers using PowerShell.

Easily change DNS servers for computers with static IP addresses using PowerShell. Run locally or remote.

Changing DNS servers

Recently I provisioned new domain controllers as part of a migration from a 2008 R2 Active Directory forest to a 2016 Active Directory forest. Like the existing 2008 R2 domain controllers, the new domain controllers are configured as AD integrated DNS servers and will be the primary and secondary DNS servers used on the internal network.

Changing DNS servers for clients using DHCP is a trivial matter; just update Option 6 for the DHCP scope with the new name server IP addresses and restart the client (or wait until they renew their lease).

However if you are like a lot of environments, you have Windows servers and maybe even workstations configured with static IP addresses and static DNS servers. How can you systematically update these configurations?

Use Measure-Command to Test Script Performance

Aaron Rothstein · December 5, 2016 · Leave a Comment

Use Measure-Command to time execution. — Using Measure-Command to measure cmdlet execution time.

Throw away your timestamp calculation snippets for testing script performance in favor of the native PowerShell cmdlet Measure-Command.

Get All PowerShell Object Properties

Aaron Rothstein · November 28, 2016 · 7 Comments

Use Get-Member to see object property definitions.

Learn how to discover all of a PowerShell object’s properties and see their values.

Use Get-ComputerInfo to Replace msinfo32

Aaron Rothstein · October 26, 2016 · 6 Comments

Get-ComputerInfo in progress... — Get-ComputerInfo in progress…

The fifth post in my PowerShell Beginner series, “Daily Tasks, The PowerShell Way“. Use PowerShell’s Get-ComputerInfo to get the same information as you would from the msinfo32 System Summary. Replace multiple WMI queries with one cmdlet.