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 VPALib library


We have created a library that contains the code which connects with Pandorabots. Any app that wants to incorporate an agent just has to deal with the interface aspects, such as the GUI appearance and the control of the speech recognition and synthesis.

The VPALib library uses ASRLib, TTSLib, and XMLLib to manage speech recognition, speech synthesis, and asynchronous tasks when retrieving web contents (you can see it if you check the libs folder in the VPALib project). This way, it can focus on the code required to manage the VPA behavior.

The main class in the VPALib library is the Bot class, which sends queries to the Pandorabots website, parses the results, and carries out the corresponding actions on the device.

When a new bot is created, we must specify an ID to the constructor. This is the ID in the Pandorabots site (for example, d7b695cf0e344c0a for Jack). Also, we can specify its topic of specialization. For example, if the bot is specialized for providing information...