Speech Services

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Speech Services
Google Text to Speech logo.svg
Developer(s)Google
Initial releaseNovember 13, 2013; 8 years ago (2013-11-13)
Stable release
24.5.347911411 / January 8, 2021; 11 months ago (2021-01-08)
Operating systemAndroid
Sizearound 37 MB
TypeScreen reader

Speech Services[1] is a screen reader application developed by Google for its Android 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 and other spoken feedback accessibility-based applications, as well as by third-party apps. Users must install voice data for each language.

Supported languages[]

  • Bengali (Bangladesh)
  • Bengali (India)
  • Cantonese (Hong Kong)
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English (Australia)
  • English (India)
  • English (United Kingdom)
  • English (United States)
  • Estonian
  • Filipino
  • Finnish
  • French (Canadian)
  • French (France)
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Javanese
  • Khmer
  • Korean
  • Mandarin (China)
  • Mandarin (Taiwan)
  • Nepali
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Sinhala
  • Slovak
  • Spanish (Spain)
  • Spanish (United States)
  • Sundanese
  • Swedish
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Uzbekistan
  • Ukrainian
  • Vietnamese

History[]

Some app developers have started adapting and tweaking their Android Auto apps to include Text-to-Speech, such as Hyundai in 2015.[2] Apps such as textPlus and WhatsApp 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, 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, in which a program stores individual phonemes and then pieces them together to form words and sentences. WaveNet instead uses machine learning to generate speech. It then waveforms from a database of human speech and re-creates them at a rate of 24,000 samples per second. The end result includes voices with subtleties like lip smacks and accents. When Google first unveiled WaveNet in 2016, it was too computationally intensive to work outside of research environments, but has since been slimmed down significantly, showing a clear pipeline from research to product.

See also[]

  • Speech synthesis
  • VoiceOver
  • Live Transcribe

References[]

  1. ^ Wang, Jules (November 8, 2021). "You'll never guess the latest Google app to cross 10 billion installs (seriously)". Android Police. Archived from the original on November 8, 2021. Retrieved November 18, 2021.
  2. ^ "Google, Hyundai show off new third-party Android Auto apps". CNET. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 17 January 2015.

External links[]

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