Chapter 1. Speech on Android Devices

Have you ever wanted to create voice-based apps that you could run on your own Android device; apps that you could talk to and that could talk back to you? This chapter provides an introduction to the use of speech on Android devices, using open-source APIs from Google for text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition. Following a brief overview of the world of Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), the chapter outlines the components of an interactive voice application (or virtual personal assistant).

By the end of this chapter you should have a good understanding of what is required to create a voice-based app using freely available resources from Google.