Question

I’m trying to call the text to speech API from Python using win32com.client. The Python interpreter is bundled with Splunk and I’m able to invoke it manually using “splunk cmd python“.

Here’s a sample

from win32com.client import constants
import win32com.client
speaker = win32com.client.Dispatch("SAPI.SpVoice")
speaker.Speak('this is a test')

My code is invoked via the splunkd process (running as a normal windows user) and I get the following error message.

(-2147352567, ‘Exception occurred.’, (0, None, None, None, 0, -2147200925), None)

I’m struggling to troubleshoot the problem, any suggestions?

The bundled Python version is
Python 2.6.4 (r264:75706, Feb 7 2011, 14:20:39) [MSC v.1400 64 bit (AMD64)]

Cross-posted from Splunk Answers
http://splunk-base.splunk.com/answers/31181/debugging-custom-search-commands

== update ==
I’ve tracked the problem down to the process launching the python interpreter.
For some reason the processes messes with the environment in such a way that the
python interpreter behaves differently. I suspect the win32 error is actually an
access violation.

Answer 1

The application runs as expected when launched as a normal user. The parent process runs as system, which fails to invoke the TTS.