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

Voice interactions


As discussed in Chapter 1, Speech on Android Devices, Google Voice Actions are simple interactions in which the user speaks a question or a command and the app responds with an action or a verbal response (or a combination of both).

Note

The following are examples of similar interactions with a simple structure and involving a small number of turns:

Example 1

User: BBC News

App: (launches BBC News)

Example 2

App: What is your query?

User: What is the capital of France?

App: (returns web pages about Paris and France)

The interactions are simple in the following ways:

  • Limited dialog management: The interactions consist of at most two or three turns.

  • Limited spoken language understanding: The user is restricted to inputs consisting of single words or phrases, such as the name of a website or of an app, or a stretch of text that can be handled by the Google search engine.