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Android

Posted by poltexious
poltexious
Courses Plus Student 6,993 Points

How to request IVONA Speech Cloud from an Android app within Android Studio

Hello,

I am trying to implement one of the best text-to-speech (TTS) services out there in an Android app which I am working on in Android Studio.

The TTS service that I would like to implement in Android is IVONA Speech Cloud, which is FREE and gives access to 53 voices (at the time being).

I am aware that there is a SDK for Android, but the problem is that it costs 1500 € for a development license (last I spoke to a sales person from IVONA) which I do not intend to pay.

Also, I am aware that I can simply download the IVONA TTS engine with a limited amount of voices and implement them in my Android application which I did some time ago. This is also free, but I would rather have access to all of the 53 voices and not only 13 (at the time being). Besides, if the user would like all the available voices, that person would have to download them all which can take up a lot of space for some users.

Put it very simply; it is my opinion that it might be the best and easiest way to have an app that sends TTS requests and receives speech (either in terms of speech files or speech URLs) from a web service like IVONA Speech Cloud. Then the user would not have to install the IVONA TTS Speech Engine including several voices.

For the time being, there is an open-source Java SDK available that implements the IVONA Speech Cloud. It is not a problem for me to run this in e.g. Eclipse. The problem is that I can not make this work with my Android App.

  • Therefore I would like to ask you if it is possible to implement that Java SDK in an Android app (in Android Studio)? If yes, how?

  • If not the above is possible, how would an implementation in Android Studio look like using the HTTP GET for API requests?

I would be VERY thankful if someone could describe for me (with code) how to implement IVONA Speech Cloud in Android Studio from the Java SDK or HTTP GET API requests.