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

Pandorabots


Pandorabots is a free open source-based web service that enables developers to create and host chatbots on the web (see http://www.pandorabots.com/). Currently, more than 221,000 chatbots are hosted, covering a range of languages. There is also a premium service for commercial development. Many VPAs on mobile devices have been created using Pandorabots. These include Voice Actions by Pannous (also known as Jeannie), Skyvi, Iris, and Pandorabot's own CallMom app. CallMom can perform the same sorts of tasks as other VPAs, but also includes a learning feature so that it can learn personal preferences and contacts, and can be taught to correct speech recognition errors.

ALICE 2.0 is one of the chatbot personalities available in the CallMom app. Its predecessor ALICE, originally developed in 1995 by Dr. Richard S. Wallace, has won numerous awards in chatbot competitions, including the Loebner prize that is awarded to the chatbot, which in an annual competition is considered by judges...