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

Using Google speech recognition


Speech recognition services have been available on Android devices since Android 2.1 (API level 7). One place where recognition is available is via a microphone icon on the Android keyboard. Clicking on the microphone button activates the Google speech recognition service, as shown in the following screenshot. The red microphone and the textual prompt indicate that the system is expecting some speech:

If no speech is detected, a re-prompt dialog is generated, asking the user to try to speak again. Another possible situation is where no suitable match can be found for the user's spoken input. In this case, the screen displays the message No matches found. Finally, the message Connection problem is displayed when no internet connection is available.

The parameters of the on-board speech recognition services can be adjusted either through Settings | Language and input | Speech | Voice Search or, depending on the device, by clicking on the Tool icon at the top hand...