TTS – SomeGadgetGuy

Why “The Classics”? Because they’re public domain and I don’t have to shell out cash for them!

Google recently updated their text to speech app, and many android users wont realize that not only is this engine now a standalone app on Google Play, but digging into the accessibility settings, there’s now a “High Quality” mode, where you can download parts of the voice to live on your phone.

Seeing as how I come from a background of voice over production, do audiobook narrators and voice actors have anything to worry about? Let’s take a listen…

Starting today you’ll start seeing an app to update you’ve probably never seen before: Google Text-to-Speech.

This is Google’s software engine which drives all of the speech capabilities on your phone. Every time your phone talks to you, it’s using some kind of software library to translate text into that helpful robotic voice which gives you turn by turn directions in Google Maps or answers your questions in Google Now.

This is a service which until now was built into Android and only updated whenever an update for the OS was pushed to phones and tablets. Like the Google Keyboard, now this service lives on its own in the Google Play app store.

Google has had issues with device and feature fragmentation, and other companies often install their own TTS engines, which is why Samsung and LG phones have a slightly different “personality” than their Nexus counterparts.

Let’s take a look at the what the service does, and what it sounds like!