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

The technology of VPA


VPAs are generally able to perform the following tasks:

  • Interacting with web services to retrieve information and perform transactions; either through search queries, by linking to knowledge bases such as Knowledge Graph, or by engaging in transactional dialogs as well as launching and managing apps on the device, such as contacts, calendar, SMS, or clock.

  • Engaging in conversation with the user about random topics, for example, answering questions such as where do you live?, how old are you?, what languages do you speak?, or what sort of music do you like?. The VPA is expected to provide some sort of response to every question so as to be able to keep the conversation going even if it does not have a proper answer to the question.

The VoiceLaunch app presented in Chapter 4, Simple Voice Interactions shows how to launch an app on a device, while the MusicBrain app presented in Chapter 5, Form-filling Dialogs shows how to implement a transactional dialog using form-filling...