Extending android TTS engine

Question

Adding a new language to the existing TTS engine in android, May I modify the existing engine without starting from scratch? since the speech synthesis framework is somewhat done, maybe I can implement a TTS for my language according to that instead taking a different approach.

Need suggestions.

Thanks

Answer 1

i think you guys got my question wrong. i wanted to build a TTS for a language where there does not exist a TTS using the default TTS engine on android.

It seems it's not that simple. At the time i asked this question i did not have a clear idea on Speech Synthesis. It requires quit alot of work and research to do. The easiest method to build a TTS for a new language was to use the "eSpeak" speech synthesizer. The implementation is very simple and it is ported to android by the eyes-free project.

Answer 2

The default Android TTS engine is based on Pico TTS. The Pico TTS is open source, in external/svox in the Android tree.

Note that it is possible to use other speech engines such as Ivona, go to settings -> voice & input -> tts settings -> engines.