Pro Android 3

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 ...