Android not acknowledging TTS Engine

Question

I am developing a very simple app in here. It\'s for my Cerebral Palsy daughter. It\'s just a big YES and NO buttons, so she can press them when requested.

Well... I am

Answer 1

I had this trouble on my application as well: TTS works in 2.3, but when I tried 4.0, it had the same symptoms as your problem (which I just found now while searching for a solution). The engine would work if you force-closed the application through Settings and started it again but just "backing out" and going back made the TTS engine in ICS not bind.

I tried setting the TTS object (mTts) to null after running mTts.shutdown(). When I started the application again after backing out, I got a null error on my mTts.speak() line.

At least for ICS, something is not letting go of the TTS engine. My solution (for now) is that I have made my TTS object static:

// in Activity
private static TextToSpeech mTts;
.
.
.
// in onCreate()
mTts = new TextToSpeech(this, this);
.
.
.
// in onDestroy()
if (mTts != null) {
   mTts.stop();
   mTts.shutdown();
   mTts = null;
}

I was already only using one TTS object for the application so I don't think there are too many downsides to this approach.