Speech Services is a

screen reader A screen reader is a form of assistive technology (AT) that renders text and image content as speech or braille output. Screen readers are essential to people who are blindness, blind, and are useful to people who are visual impairment, visually ...

application developed by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

for its

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

operating system. It powers applications to read aloud (speak) the text on the screen with support for many languages. Text-to-Speech may be used by apps such as Google Play Books for reading books aloud, by Google Translate for reading aloud translations providing useful insight to the pronunciation of words, by

Google TalkBack Google Talkback is an accessibility service for the Android operating system that helps blind and visually impaired users to interact with their devices. It uses spoken words, vibration and other audible feedback to allow the user to know what is ...

and other spoken feedback accessibility-based applications, as well as by third-party apps. Users must install voice data for each language.

Supported languages

* Albanian (Albania) * Arabic * Bengali (Bangladesh) * Bengali (India) * Bosnian (Bosnia and Herzegovina) * Bulgarian (Bulgaria) * Cantonese (Hong Kong) * Chinese (China) * Chinese (Taiwan) * Czech (Czechia) * Danish (Denmark) * Dutch (Belgium) * Dutch (Netherlands) * English (Australia) * English (Nigeria) * English (India) * English (United Kingdom) * English (United States) * Estonian (Estonia) * Filipino (Philippines) * Finnish (Finland) * French (Canadian) * French (France) * German (Germany) * Greek (Greece) * Hindi (India) * Hungarian (Hungary) * Indonesian (Indonesia) * Italian (Italy) * Japanese (Japan) * Javanese (Indonesia) * Khmer (Cambodia) * Korean (South Korea) * Latvian (Latvia) * Malay (Malaysia) * Malayalam (India) * Nepali (Nepal) * Norwegian Bokmål (Norway) * Polish (Poland) * Portuguese (Brazil) * Portuguese (Portugal) * Punjabi (India) * Romanian (Romania) * Russian (Russia) * Sinhala (Sri Lanka) * Slovak (Slovakia) * Spanish (Spain) * Spanish (United States) * Sundanese (Indonesia) * Swedish (Sweden) * Thai (Thailand) * Turkish (Turkey) * Ukrainian (Ukraine) * Urdu (Pakistan) * Vietnamese (Vietnam)

History

Some app developers have started adapting and tweaking their Android Auto apps to include Text-to-Speech, such as

Hyundai Hyundai is a South Korean industrial conglomerate ("chaebol"), which was restructured into the following groups: * Hyundai Group, parts of the former conglomerate which have not been divested ** Hyundai Mobis, Korean car parts company ** Hyundai ...

in 2015. Apps such as textPlus and

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows us ...

use Text-to-Speech to read notifications aloud and provide voice-reply functionality. Google Cloud Text-to-Speech is powered by WaveNet, software created by Google's UK-based AI subsidiary

DeepMind DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and research laboratory founded in 2010. DeepMind was List of mergers and acquisitions by Google, acquired by Google in 2014 and became a wholly owned subsid ...

, which was bought by Google in 2014. It tries to distinguish from its competitors, Amazon and Microsoft, with distinct AI features. DeepMind's AI voice synthesis tech is notably advanced and realistic. Most voice synthesizers (including Apple's Siri) use

concatenative synthesis Concatenative synthesis is a technique for synthesising sounds by concatenating short samples of recorded sound (called ''units''). The duration of the units is not strictly defined and may vary according to the implementation, roughly in the range ...

, in which a program stores individual

phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

and then pieces them together to form words and sentences. A WaveNet generates speech that sounds more natural than other text-to-speech systems. It synthesizes speech with more human-like emphasis and inflection on syllables, phonemes, and words. On average, a WaveNet produces speech audio that people prefer over other text-to-speech technologies. Unlike most other text-to-speech systems, a WaveNet model creates raw audio waveforms from scratch. The model uses a neural network that has been trained using a large volume of speech samples. During training, the network extracts the underlying structure of the speech, such as which tones follow each other and what a realistic speech waveform looks like. When given a text input, the trained WaveNet model can generate the corresponding speech waveforms from scratch, one sample at a time, with up to 24,000 samples per second and seamless transitions between the individual sounds.

References

External links

* {{Android (operating system) Speech Services Screen readers Computer-related introductions in 2013

Supported languages

History

See also

References

External links