One of my absolute favorite features of Jelly Bean is Google's new text to speech engine inside Google Now.
At first I was under the impression that the voice only sounded so good because it was prerecorded to match the limited set of Google Now commands ("The weather today is...") with arbitrary words filled in by a more versatile yet less capable engine. However, I was surprised to find that Google Now is equally capable of handling arbitrary word definitions. Which there are simply too many to prerecord. For the most part, Google Now appears to have a fully featured text to speech engine. Unfortunately, I was saddened to find that the actual text to speech engine available on Jelly Bean devices (while a significant improvement over previous iterations) is not the Google Now voice. I recall reading an article describing Jelly Bean as having two forms of text to speech. A more capable online version (the Google Now voice) and a less capable offline engine (the standard engine). This is apparently the case. So far I've found that any apps making calls to the device's text to speech engine return only the default voice, not the Google Now voice. I would be absolutely thrilled if someone found a way to build apps capable of using Google Now's online voice engine. Or at the very least, force Google Now to read arbitrary text. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en