Letting your phone talk – using the Android TextToSpeech engine

In this recipe, we'll do some very fun stuff. On your Android phone, run an app with a listening UDP server on it. When another application—in our case, a VCL application—sends a UDP broadcast with some text, the Android app will pronounce the text using the android TTS engine.

Getting ready

The first thing to do is to import the TTS classes from the android SDK in our Delphi project. That is not a simple task. However, luckily, someone already did the job. Indeed, Jeff Overcash, the maintainer of the InterBase Express (IBX) components, wrote the Android Text To Speech JNI Translation. His translation with a simple demo app is available...