Exploring Text to Speech and Translate APIs

Abstract

Android 1.6 and later features a multilingual speech synthesis engine called Pico. It allows any Android application to speak a string of text with an accent that matches the language. Text to speech allows applications to interact with users without users having to look at the screen. This can be extremely important for a mobile platform. How many people have accidentally walked into traffic when they were reading a text message? What if you could simply listen to your text messages instead? What if you could listen to a walking tour instead of reading while walking? There are countless applications where the inclusion of voice would improve an application’s usefulness. In this chapter, we’ll explore the TextToSpeech class of Android and learn what it takes to get our text spoken to us. We’ll also learn how to manage the locales, languages, and voices available.