Question

I believe I have figured out how to detect if an android device has a microphone, like so:

Intent speechIntent = new Intent(RecognizerIntent.ACTION_RECOGNIZE_SPEECH);
        List<ResolveInfo> speechActivities = packageManager.queryIntentActivities(speechIntent, 0);
        TextView micAvailView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.mic_available_flag);
        if (speechActivities.size() != 0) { //we have a microphone

        }
        else { //we do not have a microphones

        }

However, how does one detect whether the android device has speech-to-text capability? Or should the above be used to detect that? If so, how does one detect if the device has a microphone?

Any feedback is appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

The code you attached is indeed used to detect if audio recognition is available [1]:

// Check to see if a recognition activity is present
PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
List activities = pm.queryIntentActivities(
  new Intent(RecognizerIntent.ACTION_RECOGNIZE_SPEECH), 0);
if (activities.size() != 0) {
  speakButton.setOnClickListener(this);
} else {
  speakButton.setEnabled(false);
  speakButton.setText("Recognizer not present");
}

To test if a mic is present, just follow the code in [2] and the docs at [3], when calling prepare() you should get an IOException if the mic is not available:

recorder = new MediaRecorder();
recorder.setAudioSource(MediaRecorder.AudioSource.MIC);
recorder.setOutputFormat(MediaRecorder.OutputFormat.THREE_GPP);
recorder.setAudioEncoder(MediaRecorder.AudioEncoder.AMR_NB);
recorder.setOutputFile(path);
recorder.prepare();

[1] http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/speech-input.html
[2] http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/index.html#capture
[3] http://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaRecorder.AudioSource.html