Android TTS male voices

Question

Is it possible to install and configure some male voices on android.speech.tts.Voice? I have read some news that Android had made some available recently, but I can't find or configure any. All the ones that I try with command tts.setLanguage(Locale.ITALY); are female.

Answer 1

No, not at present. An enhancement request is needed so that the gender can be included in the Voice Feature Set, such that:

Voice[Name: en-AU-afi-network, locale: en_AU, quality: 500, latency: 400, requiresNetwork: true, features: [networkTimeoutMs, networkRetriesCount, male]]

I have sent emails to Text to Speech providers about including this - as waiting for an enhancement from Google is probably years away.

All you can do in the mean time, is hard-code the name of the engine with a reference to the gender. It's time consuming and there's no guarantee that they won't change the name.... Needs must for me.

Answer 2

To enhance @brandall 's answer, It is possible to use male/female voice and change it from App UI dynamically. Define TTS like this (add tts engine in constructor):

tts = new TextToSpeech(context, this, "com.google.android.tts");

contex = activity/app

this= TextToSpeech.OnInitListener

From tts.getVoices() list, chose your desired voice by it's name like this:

for (Voice tmpVoice : tts.getVoices()) {
            if (tmpVoice.getName().equals(_voiceName)) {
                return tmpVoice;
                break;
            }
}

N.B: U need to set _voiceName by getting hard coded voice_name from tts.getVoices(). e.g: for English male it would be: "en-us-x-sfg#male_1-local"

Answer 3

Here I am posting code for select male or female voice using google speech engine.

    Set<String> a=new HashSet<>();
    a.add("female");//here you can give male if you want to select mail voice.

    Voice v=new Voice("en-us-x-sfg#female_2-local",new Locale("en","US"),400,200,true,a); 
    myTTS.setVoice(v);

Here most take care about Voices name. like "en-us-x-sfg#female_2-local"

You can get all voices by using following method and you can download in file.

myTTS.getVoices() // you can get all voices of male female related information which we can set in Voice.whoever voice we want to listen.(male /female.)

Answer 4

// use this code after onInit success assuming you have initilaised text to speech as tts

Set<Voice> voices = tts.getVoices();
for (Voice tmpVoice : tts.getVoices()) {
    if (tmpVoice.getName().contains("#male") && tmpVoice.getName().contains("en-us")) {
        voice = tmpVoice;
        break;
    }
    else {
        voice = null;
    }
}
if (voice != null) {
    tts.setVoice(voice);
}

use this code on after on_init gets successful, do a version check because getVoices() got added on API level 21