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    Voice Application Development for Android: A practical guide to develop advanced and exciting voice applications for Android using open source software
    Voice Application Development for Android: A practical guide to develop advanced and exciting voice applications for Android using open source software
    Voice Application Development for Android: A practical guide to develop advanced and exciting voice applications for Android using open source software
    Ebook255 pages1 hour

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

    By Michael F. McTear and Zoraida Callejas

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    About this ebook

    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

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPackt Publishing
    Release dateNov 25, 2013
    ISBN9781783285303
    Voice Application Development for Android: A practical guide to develop advanced and exciting voice applications for Android using open source software

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      Book preview

      Voice Application Development for Android - Michael F. McTear

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      Table of Contents

      Voice Application Development for Android

      Credits

      Foreword

      About the Authors

      Acknowledgement

      About the Reviewers

      www.PacktPub.com

      Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more

      Why Subscribe?

      Free Access for Packt account holders

      Preface

      What this book covers

      What you need for this book

      Who this book is for

      Conventions

      Reader feedback

      Customer support

      Downloading the example code

      Web page for the book

      Errata

      Piracy

      Questions

      1. Speech on Android Devices

      Using speech on an Android device

      Speech-to-text

      Text-to-speech

      Voice Search

      Android Voice Actions

      Virtual Personal Assistants

      Designing and developing a speech app

      Why Google speech?

      What is needed to create a Virtual Personal Assistant?

      Summary

      2. Text-to-Speech Synthesis

      Introducing text-to-speech synthesis

      The technology of text-to-speech synthesis

      Using pre-recorded speech instead of TTS

      Using Google text-to-speech synthesis

      Starting the TTS engine

      Developing applications with Google TTS

      TTSWithLib app – Reading user input

      TTSReadFile app – Reading a file out loud

      Summary

      3. Speech Recognition

      The technology of speech recognition

      Using Google speech recognition

      Developing applications with the Google speech recognition API

      ASRWithIntent app

      ASRWithLib app

      Summary

      4. Simple Voice Interactions

      Voice interactions

      VoiceSearch app

      VoiceLaunch app

      VoiceSearchConfirmation app

      Summary

      5. Form-filling Dialogs

      Form-filling dialogs

      Implementing form-filling dialogs

      Threading

      XMLLib

      FormFillLib

      VXMLParser

      DialogInterpreter

      MusicBrain app

      Summary

      6. Grammars for Dialog

      Grammars for speech recognition and natural language understanding

      NLU with hand-crafted grammars

      Statistical NLU

      NLULib

      Processing XML grammars

      Processing statistical grammars

      The GrammarTest app

      Summary

      7. Multilingual and Multimodal Dialogs

      Multilinguality

      Multimodality

      Summary

      8. Dialogs with Virtual Personal Assistants

      The technology of VPA

      Determining the user's intention

      Making an appropriate response

      Pandorabots

      AIML

      Using oob tag to add additional functions

      The VPALib library

      Creating a Pandorabot

      Sample VPAs – Jack, Derek, and Stacy

      Alternative approaches

      Summary

      9. Taking it Further

      Developing a more advanced Virtual Personal Assistant

      Summary

      A. Afterword

      Index

      Voice Application Development for Android

      Voice Application Development for Android

      Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

      Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

      Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

      First published: November 2013

      Production Reference: 2041213

      Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

      Livery Place

      35 Livery Street

      Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

      ISBN 978-1-78328-529-7

      www.packtpub.com

      Cover Image by Aniket Sawant (<[email protected]>)

      Credits

      Authors

      Michael F. McTear

      Zoraida Callejas

      Reviewers

      Deborah A. Dahl

      Greg Milette

      Acquisition Editor

      Rebecca Youe

      Commissioning Editor

      Amit Ghodake

      Technical Editors

      Aparna Chand

      Nadeem N. Bagban

      Project Coordinator

      Michelle Quadros

      Proofreader

      Hardip Sidhu

      Indexer

      Mehreen Deshmukh

      Graphics

      Ronak Dhruv

      Production Coordinator

      Aparna Bhagat

      Cover Work

      Aparna Bhagat

      Foreword

      There are many reasons why users need to speak and listen to mobile devices. We spend the first couple of years of our lives learning how to speak and listen to other people, so it is natural that we should be able to speak and listen to our mobile devices. As mobiles become smaller, the space available for physical keypads shrinks, making more difficult to use. Wearable devices such as Google Glass and smart watches don't have physical keypads. Speaking and listening is becoming a major means of interaction with mobile devices.

      Eventually computers with microphones and speakers will be embedded into our home environment, eliminating the need for remote controls and handheld device. Speaking and listening will become the major form of communication with home appliances such as TVs, environmental controls, home security, coffee makers, ovens, and refrigerators.

      When we perform tasks that require the use of our eyes and hands, we need speech technologies. Speech is the only practical way for interacting with an Android computer while driving a car or operating complex machinery. Holding and using a mobile device while driving is illegal in some places.

      Siri and other intelligent agents enable mobile users to speak a search query. While these systems require sophisticated artificial intelligence and natural language techniques which are complex and time consuming to implement, they demonstrate the use of speech technologies that enable users to search for information.

      Guides for self-help tasks requiring both hands and eyes present big opportunities for Android applications. Soon we will have electronic guides that speak and listen to help us assemble, troubleshoot, repair, fine-tune, and use equipment of all kinds. What's causing the strange sound in my car's engine? Why won't my television turn on? How do I adjust the air conditioner to cool the house? How do I fix a paper jam in my printer? Printed instructions, user guides, and manuals may be difficult to locate and difficult to read while your eyes are examining and your hands are manipulating the equipment.

      Let a speech-enabled application talk you through the process, step-by-step. These self-help applications replace user documentation for almost any product.

      Rather than hunting for the appropriate paperwork, just download the latest instructions simply by scanning the QR code on the product. After completing a step, simply say next to listen to the next instruction or repeat to hear the current instruction again. The self-help application can also display device schematics, illustrations, and even animations and video clips illustrating how to perform a task.

      Voice messages and sounds are two of the best ways to catch a person's attention. Important alerts, notifications, and messages should be presented to the user vocally, in addition to displaying them on a screen where the user might not notice them.

      These are a few of the many reasons to develop applications that speak and listen to users. This book will introduce you to building speech applications. Its examples at different levels of complexity are a good starting point for experimenting with this technology. Then for more ideas of interesting applications to implement, see the Afterword at the end of the book.

      James A. Larson

      Vice President and Founder of Larson Technical Services

      About the Authors

      Michael F. 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.

      Zoraida Callejas is Assistant Professor at the University of Granada, Spain, where she has been teaching several subjects related to Oral and Multimodal Interfaces, Object Oriented Programming, and Software Engineering for the last eight years. She graduated in Computer Science in 2005, and was awarded a PhD in 2008 from the University of Granada. She has been Visiting Professor in Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic (2007-13), University of Trento, Italy (2008), University of Ulster, Northern Ireland (2009), Technical University of Berlin, Germany (2010), University of Ulm, Germany (2012), and Telecom ParisTech, France (2013).

      Zoraida focuses her research on speech technology and in particular, on spoken and multimodal dialogue systems. Zoraida has made presentations at the main conferences in the area of dialogue systems, and has published her research in several international journals and books. She has also coordinated training courses in the development of interactive speech processing systems, and has regularly taught object-oriented software development in Java in different graduate courses for nine years. Currently, she leads a local project for the development of Android speech applications for intellectually disabled users.

      Acknowledgement

      We would like to acknowledge the advice and help provided by Amit Ghodake, our Commissioning Editor at Packt Publishing, as well as the support of Michelle Quadros, our Project Coordinator, who ensured that we kept to schedule. A special thanks to our technical reviewers, Deborah A. Dahl and Greg Milette, whose comments and careful reading of the first draft of the book enabled us to make numerous changes in the final version that have greatly improved the quality of the book.

      Finally, we would like to acknowledge our partners Sandra McTear and David Griol for putting up with our absences while we devoted so much of our time to writing, and sharing the stress of our tight schedule.

      About the Reviewers

      Dr. Deborah A. Dahl has been working in the areas of speech and natural language processing technologies for over 30 years. She received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Minnesota in 1983, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. At Unisys Corporation, she performed research on natural language understanding and spoken dialog systems, and led teams which used these technologies in government and commercial applications. Dr. Dahl founded her company, Conversational Technologies, in 2002. Conversational Technologies provides expertise in

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