Voice Application Development for Android

A practical guide to develop advanced and exciting voice applications for Android using open source software

Overview

• A comprehensive guide containing all the best practices for voice application development for Android
• Progress quickly from basic apps to more advanced topics
• Written in an easy-to-follow style with detailed descriptions of the included code examples to help you learn quickly and efficiently
• You can download the updated code here

In Detail

Speech technology has been around for some time now. However, it has only more recently captured the imagination of the general public with the advent of personal assistants on mobile devices that you can talk to in your own language. The potential of voice apps is huge as a novel and natural way to use mobile devices.

Voice Application Development for Android is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a series of clear, step-by-step examples which will help you to build on the basic technologies and create more advanced and more engaging applications. With this book, you will learn how to create useful voice apps that you can deploy on your own Android device in no time at all.

This book introduces you to the technologies behind voice application development in a clear and intuitive way. You will learn how to use open source software to develop apps that talk and that recognize your speech. Building on this, you will progress to developing more complex apps that can perform useful tasks, and you will learn how to develop a simple voice-based personal assistant that you can customize to suit your own needs.

For more interesting information about the book, visit http://lsi.ugr.es/zoraida/androidspeechbook.

What you will learn from this book

• Use text-to-speech synthesis so that your device can talk to you
• Enable your device to recognize your speech
• Create simple voice interactions to get information and carry out commands
• Develop a voice app that engages in a dialogue with you to collect the information required to perform a transaction
• Use grammars to enable your app to understand the meaning behind your words
• Make use of different languages in your apps
• Add multimodal interaction to your apps as an alternative to speech
• Build a voice-based personal assistant using an open source development platform for chatbots

Approach

This book will give beginners an introduction to building voice-based applications on Android. It will begin by covering the basic concepts and will build up to creating a voice-based personal assistant. By the end of this book, you should be in a position to create your own voice-based applications on Android from scratch in next to no time.

Who this book is written for

Voice Application Development for Android is for all those who are interested in speech technology and for those who, as owners of Android devices, are keen to experiment with developing voice apps for their devices. It will also be useful as a starting point for professionals who are experienced in Android application development but who are not familiar with speech technologies and the development of voice user interfaces. Some background in programming in general, particularly in Java, is assumed.

Michael F. McTear

Michael McTear is Emeritus Professor of Knowledge Engineering at the University of Ulster with a special research interest in spoken language technologies. He graduated in German Language and Literature from Queens University Belfast in 1965, was awarded MA in Linguistics at University of Essex in 1975, and a PhD at the University of Ulster in 1981. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii (1986-87), the University of Koblenz, Germany (1994-95), and University of Granada, Spain (2006- 2010). He has been researching in the field of spoken dialogue systems for more than 15 years and is the author of the widely used text book Spoken Dialogue Technology: Toward the Conversational User Interface (Springer Verlag, 2004). He also is a co-author of the book Spoken Dialogue Systems (Morgan and Claypool, 2010).

Michael has delivered keynote addresses at many conferences and workshops, including the EU funded DUMAS Workshop, Geneva, 2004, the SIGDial workshop, Lisbon, 2005, the Spanish Conference on Natural Language Processing (SEPLN), Granada, 2005, and has delivered invited tutorials at IEEE/ACL Conference on Spoken Language Technologies, Aruba, 2006, and ACL 2007, Prague. He has presented on several occasions at SpeechTEK, a conference for speech technology professionals, in New York and London. He is a certified VoiceXML developer and has taught VoiceXML at training courses to professionals from companies including Genesys, Oracle, Orange, 3, Fujitsu, and Santander. He was the main developer of the VoiceXML-based home monitoring system for patients with type-2 diabetes, currently in use at the Ulster Hospital, Northern Ireland.