Chapter 9. Taking it Further

During the course of this book you have learned how to use the Google Speech APIs and to apply a range of techniques as shown in the apps described in Chapter 8, Dialogs with Virtual Personal Assistants. However, to keep these apps reasonably simple, some of the more advanced techniques were not utilized. This chapter suggests ways in which these techniques can be included in a more advanced virtual personal assistant.

Developing a more advanced Virtual Personal Assistant

The system output, which uses TTS as presented in Chapter 2, Text-to-speech synthesis could be enhanced by including the use of different voices, languages, and modalities, for example, to present information that is less suitable for spoken output.

The user input techniques for speech recognition that were introduced in Chapter 3, Speech Recognition could be developed in various ways:

• By including the similarity measures introduced in Chapter 4, Simple Voice Interactions to compare the recognized results with similar words that might have been what the user actually said

• By making use of other techniques for enhancing the recognition results, such as stemming, as described in Chapter 17 of the book Professional Android Sensor Programming by Greg Milette and Adam Stroud

• By incorporating confidence measures to support decisions on whether to use confirmations, as described in Chapter 4, Simple Voice Interactions

• By making use of the n-best...

Summary

This chapter has presented various suggestions for extending the examples presented in this book. You are encouraged to test, modify, and play with the code provided in the book. In the website for the book at http://lsi.ugr.es/zoraida/androidspeechbook you will find the source for the code, as well as further ideas for new projects, and a variety of interesting resources and updates. Voice technology is an exciting topic that offers an ocean of possibilities to Android developers. We invite you to take a deep breath and immerse yourself in it!