Chapter 24. Exploring Text to Speech

Android, versions 1.6 and later, features a multilingual speech synthesis engine called Pico. It allows any Android application to speak a string of text with an accent that matches the language. Text-to-speech software allows users to interact with applications without having to look at the screen. This can be extremely important for a mobile platform. How many people have accidentally walked into traffic when they were reading a text message? What if you could simply listen to your text messages instead? What if you could listen to a walking tour instead of reading while walking? There are countless applications where the inclusion of voice would improve an application's usefulness. In this chapter, we'll explore the TextToSpeech class of Android and learn what it takes to get our text spoken to us. We'll also learn how to manage the locales, languages, and voices available.