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

Developing applications with Google TTS


In order to avoid repeating the code in several places, and to be able to focus on the new parts as we progress to more complex applications, we have encapsulated the most frequently used TTS functionalities into a library named TTSLib (see sandra.libs.tts in the source code), which is employed in the different applications.

The TTS.java class has been created following the Singleton design pattern. This means that there can only be a single instance of this class, and thus an app that employs the library uses a single TTS object with which all messages are synthesized. This has multiple advantages, such as optimizing resources and preventing developers from unwittingly creating multiple TextToSpeech instances within the same application.

TTSWithLib app – Reading user input

The next figure shows the opening screen of this app, in which the user types a text, chooses a language, and then presses a button to make the device start or stop reading the text...