From print debugging to logger, with added TTS

Via my feeds yesterday, I spotted a post entitled Say Goodbye to Print Statements: How to Use Logger for Effective Debugging which suggests using the Python logging package rather than print statements for casual debugging.

Hmmm…

So I wondered whether this might be a handy thing to suggest to students.

It’s a little bit of faff to set up a logger, but if we want students to use this sort of thing we need to minimise the boilerplate, and try to resist the temptation to pre-load packages into the student Python environment*.

* The reason being we want students to be able to do things elsewhere, and if we load too much stuff behind the scenes, if they move to a new environment, they may wonder why things don’t work the same was as they seemed to work before.

Repo for the package I cobbled together here: https://github.com/innovationOUtside/ou-logger-py

One good reason for using a logger is that you can set a logging level, and then include logging (“print”) statements that only produce an output at or above that logging level:

logger.setLevel(LEVEL)
# LEVEL: DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, CRITICAL

logger.error('This is an error message')
logger.warning('This is a warning message')

Thinks: it would be nice to have logging groups as well, so maybe something like:

logger.setGroups(["ingest", "analysis"]

logger.error('This is an ingest error message', "ingest")

I guess the way to do that is just to have different loggers (logger1, logger2, etc)? Related issue here.

Anyway. Basic student use…

STEP 1. A simple package that lets you just get going.

from ou_logger import logger

But then I wondered… how about if the logger can also speak the message aloud? We’re working in Jupyter notebooks, so we can get access to the browser text-to-speech module

So, STEP 2:

# Via ChatGPT
from IPython.display import display, Javascript

# Define a custom logging handler that speaks the log messages using browser TTS
class BrowserTTSHandler(logging.Handler):
    def emit(self, record):
        msg = self.format(record)
        # Use JavaScript to speak the message in the browser
        display(
            Javascript(f'speechSynthesis.speak(new SpeechSynthesisUtterance("{msg}"))')
        )

So now with a from ou_logger import logger, set_handler we can say:

set_handler("text")
set_handler("text, tts")
set_handler("tts")

If we have the "tts" handler set, the message will be spoken aloud by the browser speechSynthesis module.

When I tested this, the JupyterLab environment I was using also had my jupyterlab_cell_status_extension installed with the audible cell completion alert and error message TTS enabled which made for quite an audible experience…