Android Text to Speech Tutorial

•   1 response
• Tweet
• Delicious

Android is providing a cool feature (from Android 1.6) called Text to Speech (TTS) which speaks the text in different languages. This tutorial explains how to work with android text to speech or android speech synthesis. In this tutorial i also explained changing the language type, pitch level and speed level.

Below i provided video of the ouput.

I developed a simple interface with one input field and a button to trigger a event that will take text from input field and speaks out.

1. Create a new project by going to File ⇒ New Android Project. and fill required details.
2. Implement your main Activity class from TextToSpeech.OnInitListener

public class AndroidTextToSpeechActivity extends Activity implements TextToSpeech.OnInitListener {

3. Now add following code your class.

package com.androidhive.texttospeech;

import java.util.Locale;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech;
import android.util.Log;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.Button;
import android.widget.EditText;

public class AndroidTextToSpeechActivity extends Activity implements
		TextToSpeech.OnInitListener {
	/** Called when the activity is first created. */

	private TextToSpeech tts;
	private Button btnSpeak;
	private EditText txtText;

	@Override
	public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
		setContentView(R.layout.main);

		tts = new TextToSpeech(this, this);

		btnSpeak = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnSpeak);

		txtText = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.txtText);

		// button on click event
		btnSpeak.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {

			@Override
			public void onClick(View arg0) {
				speakOut();
			}

		});
	}

	@Override
	public void onDestroy() {
		// Don't forget to shutdown tts!
		if (tts != null) {
			tts.stop();
			tts.shutdown();
		}
		super.onDestroy();
	}

	@Override
	public void onInit(int status) {

		if (status == TextToSpeech.SUCCESS) {

			int result = tts.setLanguage(Locale.US);

			if (result == TextToSpeech.LANG_MISSING_DATA
					|| result == TextToSpeech.LANG_NOT_SUPPORTED) {
				Log.e("TTS", "This Language is not supported");
			} else {
				btnSpeak.setEnabled(true);
				speakOut();
			}

		} else {
			Log.e("TTS", "Initilization Failed!");
		}

	}

	private void speakOut() {

		String text = txtText.getText().toString();

		tts.speak(text, TextToSpeech.QUEUE_FLUSH, null);
	}
}

4. Now run your project and test your app by entering some text in input filed.

Changing Language

You can change language to speak by using setLanguage() function. Lot of languages are supported like Canada, French, Chinese, Germany etc.,

tts.setLanguage(Locale.CHINESE); // Chinese language

Changing Pitch Rate

You can set speed pitch level by using setPitch() function. By default the value is 1.0 You can set lower values than 1.0 to decrease pitch level or greater values for increase pitch level.

tts.setPitch(0.6);

Changing Speed Rate

The speed rate can be set using setSpeechRate(). This also will take default of 1.0 value. You can double the speed rate by setting 2.0 or make half the speed level by setting 0.5

tts.setSpeechRate(2);