Question

I am trying to implement text to speech technology of android in my Activity but I face a strange error. I can’t hear any sound, from my code. The speak method works only if I place it in onInit method, else it doesn’t speak.

My code is as follows :

public class GameOverActivity extends Activity implements OnInitListener {
private TextToSpeech talker;
....
talker = new TextToSpeech(this, this);  
say("Something",false);
...
   public void onInit(int status) {  
        if (status == TextToSpeech.SUCCESS) {
          talker.setLanguage(Locale.US);
        }
        else if (status == TextToSpeech.ERROR) {
            Toast.makeText(this,"Error occurred while initializing Text-To-Speech engine", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
        }

void say(String text, boolean flush) {
         if(flush == true)
         {
        talker.speak(text,TextToSpeech.QUEUE_FLUSH,null);
         }
         if(flush == false)
         {
        talker.speak(text,TextToSpeech.QUEUE_ADD,null);
         }         
    }

The strange thing is that if I place the say method in onInit, it works fine!

I watched logcat carefully and here are the results :

TtsService.OnCreate ()
TTs is loading
AudioTrack started
TTSService.setLanguage
loaded en-US succusfully
setting speech rate to 100

and then nothing happens.

Any idea about what is wrong with the above code?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

After some more hours looking the code, I noticed that the problem is that TTS engine initialization takes some time. If initialization is not over, the speak method call will fail.

If you “say” something on button click, you will probably won’t need this, because user will take some time to think before pressing the button, and the initialization will be over.

If you want to “say” something as soon initialization finishes, use this code :

talker = new TextToSpeech(this, new TextToSpeech.OnInitListener() {

        @Override
        public void onInit(int arg0) {
       if(arg0 == TextToSpeech.SUCCESS) 
           {
        talker.setLanguage(Locale.US);
            say(gameover,true);
            say(line,false);
            say(definition_string,false);
            }
        }
    });