Writing Talking Applications for Android

Toward the end of last year, we released an Android binding to eSpeak, an Open Source Text To Speech (TTS) engine that provides support for a large number of languages. Since then, we have seen significant interest among the developer community. Many have stepped up to using the Text To Speech service for a wide variety of end-user scenarios.

Based on our implementation experience, we've once again updated the TTS service and the update is available from Android Market as before. In addition to the source code, you can find extensive documentation, including an online tutorial on using the TTS API on the Eyes-Free project site. You might also want to subscribe to our Eyes-Free Android YouTube Channel or check out Marvin, the Eyes-Free Shell for Android. Marvin provides a useful launchpad for developers creating eyes-free applications using spoken output via the TTS API.

We'd like to thank the eSpeak developers for a versatile Open Source TTS engine, and look forward to turning Android into a productive eyes-free environment!

By Charles Chen, Software Engineering Team and T.V. Raman, Research Scientist