Question

The Google Voice Search comes with a significant delay from the moment you call it via startActivityForResult() until its dialog box is displayed, ready to take your speech.

This requires the user to always look at the screen, waiting for the dialog box to be displayed, before speaking.

It would be nice to add a ‘ding’ sound or some other non-visual cue to when Voice Search is ready to accept speech input.

Is this possible at all?

If so, how do go about doing that?

Answer 1

Ok this will complicate your program, however, if you really want that signal consider implementing the speech recognition by an object instead of calling the intent or making your own activity.

(warning: much of this is speculation including the order of calls)

Perhaps the delay is in instantiating resources before actually listening. If my theory is correct than you could setRecognitionListener(RecognitionListener listener) (the latency passes), create a recognizerIntent object (maybe some more latency passes), finally in (an overridden) startListening(Intent recognizerIntent), call a “PING!” before calling the super method.

It is up to you whether you would like to wrap all this functionality in a new activity, which is probably recommended, or to tack on the latency to the UI.