Zebble.Speech

A Zebble plugin To get the device operating system to read a piece of text out loud or recongnize the spoken words.

With the user's permission, get recognition of live and prerecorded speech, and receive transcriptions. Also you'll be able to convert text to spoken language.

Setup

• Available on NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Zebble.Speech/
• Install in your platform client projects.
• Available for iOS, Android and UWP.

Platform Specific Notes

iOS

In order to be able to use the speech recognition, you need to add the following tags to the info.plist file.

<key>NSMicrophoneUsageDescription</key>
<string>{A proper description.}</string>
<key>NSSpeechRecognitionUsageDescription</key>
<string>{A proper description.}</string>

Api Usage

Call Zebble.Device.Speech from any project to gain access to APIs.

Read a text:

await Device.Speech.Speak("Hello world!");

Stop reading:

Device.Speech.Stop();

Get available languages:

var languages = Device.Speech.Language.GetInstalledLanguages();

Text to Speech Settings:

var settings = new Device.Speech.Settings
{
    // The relative highness or lowness of a tone as perceived by the ear
    // Default pitch is 1
    Pitch = 1.2, 
    // Default speed is 1
    // It could be a value between 0 to 10
    Speed = 1.5,
    // Default volume is 1
    // It could be a value between 0 to 1
    Volume = 0.8,
    // If not specified, the device's default language will be used
    Language = new Device.Speech.Language("fr")
};

await Device.Speech.Speak("Hello world!", settings);

To use speech recognizer:

void StartButtonTapped()
{
   Device.Speech.Recognizer.Start(Listener);
}

void Listener(string heardWords)
{
   // TODO: Use the words as you please. 
   // The provided string may contain a single word; or a number of them.
   // For example, you can use a class-level StringBuilder class, 
   // add all heard words to it, and show the concatenated result on the screen.
}

void StopButtonTapped()
{
   Device.Speech.Recognizer.Stop();
}

Methods

Method	Return Type	Parameters	Android	iOS	Windows
Speech.Speak	Task	text -> string setting -> Speech.Settings	x	x	x
Speech.Stop	void	-	x	x	x
Speech.Recognizer.Start	Task<bool>	listener -> Action<string> errorAction -> OnError	x	x	x
Speech.Recognizer.Stop	Task	-	x	x	x