Why Google speech?

The following are our reasons for using Google speech:

• The proliferation of Android devices: Recent information on Android states that "Android had a worldwide smartphone market share of 75% during the third quarter of 2012,with 750 million devices activated in total and 1.5 million activations per day." (From http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23771812 Retrieved 09/07/2013).

• The Android SDK is open source: The fact that the Android SDK is open source makes it more easily available for developers and enthusiasts to create apps, compared with some other operating systems. Anyone can develop their own apps using a free development environment such as Eclipse and then upload it to their Android device for their own personal use and enjoyment.

• The Google Speech APIs: The Google Speech APIs are available for free for use on Android devices. This means that the Speech APIs are useful for developers wishing to try out speech without investing in expensive commercially available alternatives. As Google employs many of the top speech scientists, their speech APIs are comparable in performance to those on offer commercially.

Tip

You may also try…

Nuance NDEV Mobile, which supports a number of languages for text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition as well as providing a PhoneGap plug-in to enable developers to implement their apps on different platforms (http://dragonmobile.nuancemobiledeveloper.com).

The AT&T Speech Mashup (http://www.research.att.com/projects/SpeechMashup/), which supports the development of speech-based apps and the use of W3C standard speech recognition grammars.