alexkrishnan / hear2read_tts_tamil_engine_android

Source code for the Hear2Read Tamil TTS app

Hear2Read Text to Speech Tamil Engine for Android

Authors:	Alok Parlikar Andrew Wilkinson

Introduction

Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast-runtime speech synthesis engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University and primarily designed for small embedded devices. Flite is an open-source synthesis engine that can be used to provide text-to-speech functionality on smartphones and similar devices. For more information about Flite, visit http://www.cmuflite.org.

This application wraps the Flite engine so that it can be installed as an application on Android devices. This app gets installed as a TTS library, thereby allowing other applications to make use of Flite for Tamil language synthesis. Specifically, this app has been tested with @Voice Aloud Reader, Voice Dream Reader, GoRead, and Talkback on Android 5.1 (Lollipop).

This application has been developed with support from Hear2Read and is based on the "Flite TTS Engine for Android" app developed by Alok Parlikar available at https://github.com/happyalu/Flite-TTS-Engine-for-Android.

For information about Hear2Read, visit http://www.hear2read.org/.

Installing this Application

This app is available on the Google Play Store at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.hear2read.Tamil&hl=en. Alternatively, using this source code, you can generate an .apk file and install it on your device. Devices running Android versions 2.2 (Froyo) or later are supported.

After installing this application, all that is needed to install the voice data is to open the app once. It will automatically copy the necessary files to phone SD storage under the directory "hear2read-data." Next:

On Android 5.1:

1. Enter "Settings" → "Language & Input" → "Text-to-speech output"
2. Select Hear2Read Tamil under "Preferred engine"
3. Tap the gear icon next to "Hear2Read Tamil" and specify "Language" as "Tamil (India,female;sxv)"
4. Select the speech rate, if desired, under "Speech rate"

You can tap "Listen to an example" to verify that the engine is working.

On Android 6.1:

1. Enter "Settings" → "Language and input" → "Text-to-speech"
2. Select Hear2Read Tamil under "Preferred TTS engine"
3. Tap the gear icon next to "Hear2Read Tamil" and specify "Language" as "Tamil (India,female;sxv)"
4. Select the speech rate, if desired, using the slider. A sample sentence will play.

Building this App from Source

Instructions here have been tested on Linux and are currently being tested for Mac OS X.

Requirements

In order to build this application, you need the following:

• The source code for Flite, which is included in this distribution in the directory "flite".

This version of Flite contains updates for Tamil and other Indic languages that are not yet part of the standard Flite distribution. - Android NDK Release 10d - Android SDK Release 24.0.2

The NDK can be found, as of August 1, 2016, at the following links:

• Windows 32-bit : http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r10d-windows-x86.exe
• Windows 64-bit : http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r10d-windows-x86_64.exe
• Mac OS X 64-bit : http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r10d-darwin-x86_64.bin
• Mac OS X 32-bit : http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r10d-darwin-x86.bin
• Linux 32-bit (x86) : http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r10d-linux-x86.bin
• Linux 64-bit (x86) : http://dl.google.com/android/ndk/android-ndk-r10d-linux-x86_64.bin

(Change permissions to +x if necessary.)

The SDK can be most easily installed through downloading Android Studio and using its built-in SDK Manager toolkit: - https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html

Application Build Steps

Export necessary environment variables

export FLITEDIR=/path/to/flite
export FLITE_APP_DIR=/path/to/this/application
export ANDROID_NDK=/path/to/android/ndk
export ANDROID_SDK=/path/to/android/sdk

Build Flite Engine for multiple architectures

cd $FLITEDIR
./configure --with-langvox=android --target=armeabi-android
make
./configure --with-langvox=android --target=armeabiv7a-android
make
./configure --with-langvox=android --target=x86-android
make
./configure --with-langvox=android --target=mips-android
make

Build shared libraries

cd $FLITE_APP_DIR
$ANDROID_NDK/ndk-build

Build installable application package (debug mode)

cd $FLITE_APP_DIR
ant debug -Dsdk.dir=$ANDROID_SDK

Upon completing these steps, the file "FliteEngine-debug-unaligned.apk" should appear in the "bin" directory. This file can be opened with Package Installer on an Android device.