latest
For as complex as modern technology is, we're also in an age where accessibility features are more advanced than ever. Google is among the many companies that has clearly prioritized their development, actively building out plenty of customizable accessibility features. This week, we're learning about text-to-speech (TTS) features getting a major upgrade for most Android devices.
You'll never guess the latest Google app to cross 10 billion installs (seriously)
Do we have to say it out loud?
Just last week, Google Maps rolled over its odometer to 10 billion installations on Android. Now, a much more mundane app has crossed the threshold.
New Google Photos interface tweaks make it easier to access Lens tools
Tap the Lens icon or scroll down to easily spot your options
The Google Lens tool is fantastic for quickly grabbing relevant info from photos. Now it's getting a little easier to use if you're a Google Photos devotee. Our readers have spotted a few new tools when you tap the Lens icon while viewing a single item in the official Google Photos app, or when you scroll down to use the more expanded photo info panel. It's hard to pin down when these features went live, but it appears to be within the last couple of weeks.
Tell Google Assistant to 'Read It,' including webpages translated from 42 languages
Text-to-speech is getting way better with syntax and expression
The ways we experience media on the web tend to be designed only for the publisher's intended medium. You don't consume videos just for their sound, for example, and podcasts don't often come with word-for-word transcripts, but there are ways of enjoying those pieces of content with augmentation. Some of the toughest challenges in making text sites cross-consumable via dictation has been in naturalizing machine voices and translating stories rich in grammatical tapestry from other languages. Google Assistant is now bringing its answers to those challenges with new text-to-speech functionality available today.
Too much content to read but not enough time? Consider listening to it instead. Audm (pronounced 'autumn') is an app that gets professional voice actors to narrate long-form articles from the web. Previously iOS-exclusive, people have been asking for an Android version since 2016, and last year Audm hired a developer for the job. After a brief closed beta, the app is now publicly available for Android.
Tasker, the Android automation behemoth, is a tool limited only by your imagination — it has been used for everything from improving personal workflows to interfacing with enterprise systems. In the newest beta release, 5.7.0-beta, developer Joaomgcd demoed an interesting new feature, "Say Wavenet", which brings natural sounding Text-to-Speech to Tasker using Google's WaveNet algorithm (the same technology that powers Assistant responses).
Google Assistant is good at performing actions and answering questions for which there's a straightforward answer. If you give it a more open-ended query, Assistant needs to scan the internet for something relevant. Now, it'll be a little better at that thanks to a new structured data specification called "speakable."
Google's Text-to-Speech app is what lets the devices it runs on read text out loud to their users. The functionality is used for translation and accessibility services, among other things. It's updated pretty frequently: January saw the addition of Estonian, Romanian, and Slovak; last October, Filipino and Greek. Text-to-Speech's most recent update adds Canadian French, Javanese, and Sudanese.
Back in December last year, we looked in-depth at the work Google has been doing to improve text-to-speech and other artificial language use cases. Artificial voice synthesis can be much more powerful and impressive thanks to WaveNet neural network technology, developed by Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind. It's been used to make the Google Assistant sound more natural, and now makes up part of a whole new product: Cloud Text-to-Speech.
Google Text-to-speech isn't an application that most of us interact with on a daily basis, but it's very useful to the right audience. We don't often see new languages instilled here, with the last time being back in October with Filipino and Greek, but Google has just added support for Estonian, Romanian, and Slovak.
Get ready for the little person living inside your phone and speaker to sound a lot more life-like. Google believes it has reached a new milestone in the quest to make computer-generated speech indistinguishable from human speech with Tacotron 2, a system that trains neural networks to generate eerily natural-sounding speech from text, and they have the samples to prove it.
If you've never used it before, Pocket is a storage place for all the articles you want to read later. You can use the browser extensions to add articles, then read them later through the site or mobile app. The Android app is receiving a new update, improving on the text-to-speech playback feature, with more functionality available in the beta channel.
Google Text-to-speech may not be the sexiest app out there, but it's a particularly useful one for many people, especially those who make use of accessibility options such as Talkback on Android phones. The last meaningful update to it came back in April (v3.11) with a few new languages (Bangla (India), Czech, Khmer, Nepali, Sinhala, and Ukrainian) as well as improvements to voices and better number processing.
Google's Text-to-speech (TTS) is an accessibility feature that's long been a part of Android. It's a screen reader that can read aloud anything currently on display, a vital utility for users who are blind or partially-sighted. TTS isn't updated very often, but when it is it's usually to add something meaningful. The last update added support for new languages, as well as pronunciation and intonation improvements. We've now been made aware that there's also an experimental always-on language detection switch, available to those using Android O.
Google TTS was updated to version 3.11 a few days ago, but the changelog was just posted after a minor bump to 3.11.12. It turns out that this one brings support for several new languages including Ukrainian, Czech, Bangla (native to India and Bangladesh), Khmer (aka Cambodian), Nepali, and Sinhala (native to Sri Lanka).
Read update
- What's better than version 3.9.6 of Google TTS? If you answered version 3.9.11 then you'll be super excited. If not, and you're still reading this, then you're either interested in Google TTS or you have a compulsive need to install the latest APK from any app. Either way, there's a newer version of Google TTS that's rolling out and it's a little higher than the one we talked about here. You can grab it from APK Mirror too.
Google's Text-to-Speech engine has seen many updates over the past months with new voices, more natural enunciation, and more. What it's getting in this latest version is more of a functional improvement. Oh and there are a few new languages thrown in too.
Google employees Natalie Hammel and Lorraine Yurshansky, who go by Nat & Lo for their series of informative Google tour videos, are at it again. This time the pair are demonstrating the recent improvements to Google's Text-To-Speech engine (TTS), which many of our readers have already experienced. Since synthesized, human-style voice functions are part of the biggest new trend in usability and gadgets, it's kind of a big deal.
Your phone has been able to talk to you for years, but it started out sounding like a computerized toaster with laryngitis. Google has improved its text to speech (TTS) voice over the years, and a new version is rolling out now. The change is fairly dramatic, with the new voice sounding much more natural and pleasant.