Google is upgrading the Speech Services by Google speech engine in what the company describes as "a big way, providing clearer, more natural voices".

Speech Services is a screen reader application developed by Google for the Android operating system. Using it, applications can read aloud the text on the screen or can convert speech from the user to text. It supports 67 languages with a choice of multiple voices for many of the languages.

Leland Rechis, Group Product Manager for Speech Services at Google, said that developers who already use TTS and the Speech Services by Google engine need do nothing, as everything will happen behind the scenes as your users will have automatically downloaded the latest update.

Rechis said Google has seen a significant side by side quality increase with this change, particularly in respects to clarity and naturalness.

The upgrade also sees a replacement default voice in en-US to one that is built using fresher speaker data, and this with the other changes represents "a drastic improvement".

The blog post includes samples of the original and replacement voices in US English, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese and United States Spanish.

All 421 voices in 67 languages have been upgraded with a new voice model and synthesizer. The update will be rolling out to all 64-bit Android devices via the Google Play Store over the next few weeks as a part of the Speech Services by Google APK. If developers don't think their users will have updated this yet, the key is the minimum version code ,210390644 on the package com.google.android.tts.

More Information

Speech Services On Google Play

Android Developers Blog

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