Book Image

Voice Application Development for Android

Book Image

Voice Application Development for Android

Overview of this book

Speech technology has been around for some time now. However, it has only more recently captured the imagination of the general public with the advent of personal assistants on mobile devices that you can talk to in your own language. The potential of voice apps is huge as a novel and natural way to use mobile devices. Voice Application Development for Android is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a series of clear, step-by-step examples which will help you to build on the basic technologies and create more advanced and more engaging applications. With this book, you will learn how to create useful voice apps that you can deploy on your own Android device in no time at all. This book introduces you to the technologies behind voice application development in a clear and intuitive way. You will learn how to use open source software to develop apps that talk and that recognize your speech. Building on this, you will progress to developing more complex apps that can perform useful tasks, and you will learn how to develop a simple voice-based personal assistant that you can customize to suit your own needs. For more interesting information about the book, visit http://lsi.ugr.es/zoraida/androidspeechbook
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Voice Application Development for Android
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Afterword
Index

Chapter 4. Simple Voice Interactions

Wouldn't it be great if you could just speak to your mobile device to ask it for information or to get it to do something? This chapter looks at simple voice interactions that allow you to do just this. Two tutorial examples will show you how to implement a query to search for information as well as a request to launch one of the apps on your device.

Speech recognition is not perfect, thus it is interesting to implement some mechanisms to choose only the best recognition results. In previous chapters, we studied how to obtain confidence measures. In this chapter, we will cover two new mechanisms: similarity measures to compare the recognized input with what the user said, and confirmations to directly ask the user if the system understood correctly.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to develop simple voice interactions to request information and carry out commands on your device. You should also be aware of how to use similarity measures and...