One of my absolute favorite features of Jelly Bean is Google's new text to
speech engine inside Google Now.
At first I was under the impression that the voice only sounded so good
because it was prerecorded to match the limited set of Google Now commands
("The weather today is...") with arbitrary words filled in by a more
versatile yet less capable engine. However, I was surprised to find that
Google Now is equally capable of handling arbitrary word definitions. Which
there are simply too many to prerecord. For the most part, Google Now
appears to have a fully featured text to speech engine.
Unfortunately, I was saddened to find that the actual text to speech engine
available on Jelly Bean devices (while a significant improvement over
previous iterations) is not the Google Now voice. I recall reading an
article describing Jelly Bean as having two forms of text to speech. A more
capable online version (the Google Now voice) and a less capable offline
engine (the standard engine). This is apparently the case.
So far I've found that any apps making calls to the device's text to speech
engine return only the default voice, not the Google Now voice. I would be
absolutely thrilled if someone found a way to build apps capable of using
Google Now's online voice engine. Or at the very least, force Google Now to
read arbitrary text.
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