Chapter 11. Using speech and storing data on your phone
In this chapter, we’ll look at the different ways you can change words (text) into the Android voice and how you can record your own voice and change that into text. We’ll also examine how you can store items such as text and pictures on your phone.
What is the difference between text to speech and speech to text?
| |
User/programmer |
App Inventor |
Need to be online? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text to speech | Inputs text | Speaks aloud | Nope |
| Speech to text | Speaks aloud | Uses Google Voice to convert to text | Yessir |
In recent years speech recognition has improved a great deal, but it still isn’t perfect. Text to speech is more reliable and effective but still has some funny quirks, such as mispronouncing words. Technical words are often mispronounced—for example, megapixel is pronounced “maygaypixel.” You’ll also have problems with Roman numerals: King George V is pronounced “King George Vee” by text to speech. But speech to text and text to speech both have the potential to allow you to produce some fun apps, so let’s give them a go.
The possibilities presented by text to speech are massive, from creating apps for visually impaired people to including spoken words in a game. The most basic example would be text added to a button so that when the user clicks the button, the text is read aloud. But text can be input by the user, too, or received via an SMS text from someone contacting the user, and automatically read aloud.
