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

Summary


This chapter has shown how to implement form-filling dialogs in which the app engages in simple conversations with the user in order to retrieve several pieces of data which can later be used to provide advanced functionalities to the user through web services or mashups.

The FormFillLib contains the classes to retrieve and parse an XML definition of the dialog structure into Java objects. These objects are employed to control the oral interaction with the user. This library makes it possible to easily build any form-filling dialog in an Android app by specifying its structure in a simplified VoiceXML file accessible on the Internet.

The MusicBrain app shows how to use the library to gather information from the user through a spoken conversation to query a web service. In this case, the app asks the user for a word and two dates which are used to query the MusicBrainZ open music encyclopedia for albums with the word in their title and those released between the specified dates. The...