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

VoiceLaunch app


The functionality of this app is as follows:

  1. When clicking on the Press to speak button, the user is prompted for the name of an app.

  2. The user says the name of an app.

  3. VoiceLaunch compares the recognized input against the names of all the apps installed in the device, and launches the one whose name is the most similar.

An application like VoiceLaunch does not require any interface, as the user could just speak the name of the app they want to be launched. However, for illustration purposes, we have created a simple interface in which the user can choose the values of two parameters: a similarity threshold and a similarity criterion, as shown in the following screenshot. The screenshot shows the scenario in which the user has asked to launch Email. VoiceLaunch shows the screen in the figure and launches the Email application (the one with the highest similarity, in this case 1.00):

We have introduced the technique of similarity criteria to show how to improve on the results from...