Text to Speech not working in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean

Question

We added voice prompts to our app using the Text to Speech API a couple years ago and it has been working well. Recently, we started receiving email from users that upgraded to

Answer 1

TTS checking with Android OS4.1 and OS 4.2 is, being polite, different.

OS 4.1 does not correctly handle the intent to install data*

TextToSpeech.Engine.ACTION_INSTALL_TTS_DATA

OS 4.2 does not correctly handle the intent to check for voice data*

TextToSpeech.Engine.ACTION_CHECK_TTS_DATA

* By this I mean that it doesn't return the correct status codes as per the old versions. For example, CHECK_TTS_DATA returns CHECK_VOICE_DATA_MISSING_DATA when it clearly does have voice data installed. It's possible that there is some other intent data that now needs to be passed, but I'm not sure where this is documented.

In my apps I have had to disable these checks for newer OS versions. I suspect Google may have done this because their terms to use Android now mandate TTS (but I can't verify this - I'm sure there's a site out there that describes exactly what must be implemented to be called 'Android')

Update

As I suspected, Android OS 4.1 now mandates Text-to-Speech be included in every Android device, thus the checks are now somewhat redundant. From this link: Android 4.1 Compatibility Definition

3.11 Text-to-Speech
Android 4.1 includes APIs that allow applications to make use of text-to-speech (TTS) services, and allows service providers to provide implementations of TTS services [Resources, 32]. Device implementations MUST meet these requirements related to the Android TTS framework:

• Device implementations MUST support the Android TTS framework APIs and SHOULD include a TTS engine supporting the languages available on the device. Note that the upstream Android open source software includes a full-featured TTS engine implementation.
• Device implementations MUST support installation of third-party TTS engines.
• Device implementations MUST provide a user-accessible interface that allows users to select a TTS engine for use at the system level.