google text to speech

google text to speech

The Importance of Google Text to Speech

1. Introduction

The goal of any assistive technology (AT) software in education is to increase and improve comprehension for students. Whether students have deficits in decoding, fluency, or reading comprehension, AT can help (Livingstone & Oosthuizen, 2007). In this way, AT does more than simply “leveling the playing field”. Instead, AT provides a means for students to achieve success in their learning environment (Livingstone & Oosthuizen, 2007). As a web-based application, Google Text-to-Speech provides a synthesis of the written content of a webpage in a reading format that is natural and easy to understand. By doing so, TTS eliminates the varying aspect of reading ability and level among students. According to the National Reading Panel, phonemic awareness and decoding are best developed by practice in specific activities. However, comprehension is a general skill that depends on the efficient interaction among the reader’s knowledge, the information in the text, and the context for comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000). By allowing the student to follow along with the TTS reading, the student can allocate less time and energy understanding the pronunciation and meaning of the words. This, in effect, will free cognitive resources to understand other components of comprehension.

2. Benefits of Google Text to Speech

With TTS technology, words are converted to speech that can be useful for students with learning disabilities who might have difficulty processing written information. Listening to the words helps them to comprehend the material better. It can also help them to process the information more quickly, particularly if they are slow readers. Independent readers can benefit from TTS technology, too. For instance, listening to a text while reading along can improve comprehension and fluency. Language learners can benefit from text to speech too. They are able to listen to pronunciation of unfamiliar words and can hear the tone and rhythm of the language. They have the ability to pause and look up words they don’t understand which can facilitate learning quite a bit. Published writers, who often must proofread their own work, can use TTS technology to listen to their writing to find mistakes. This can be helpful in identifying awkward or incorrect word choices. Reading text aloud is a great way to catch simple errors. TTS can help to make the proofreading process more efficient.

3. Applications of Google Text to Speech

How can Google Text to Speech be applied within the classroom? Are there any creative ways that students can apply this technology? In general, Google’s Text to Speech feature can be useful in many ways to both children and adults in the work field. Although it was not specifically designed for the classroom, students and teachers may employ the feature in many ways at school and home. Text to Speech may benefit language learners or children with developmental speech and language impairments. These children can use the feature to correct and improve their pronunciation. Hearing their mistakes being read aloud to them may serve as a form of feedback and be a useful tool in improving their spoken language. Busy students on the go may simply save some audio notes to their devices for later playback using the app. Audio playback is a useful feature for students who may not have the capacity to read a particular article at the given time. Visual learners may also benefit from having difficult concepts or large blocks of text read to them by the computer. Finally, students or teachers may employ the feature to easily convert text from old documents into audio form. Text to Speech may not always sound natural, but it can certainly save time over re-typing the entire document.

4. How to Use Google Text to Speech

Firstly, you need to download a language pack if you are planning to use text-to-speech for a language other than English. Then, you need to install Google Text-to-speech app if you haven’t already. For this, go to your phone’s Settings, then go to Accessibility and then Text-to-speech output. Now, setup the app if you don’t have it installed or you can configure your installed app. Each app has different options regarding Text-to-speech, you can configure it directly by opening the app or from phone’s settings. Now you are ready to use the app for different purposes. For instance, let’s see how you can use it on websites and e-books. This can be very useful for people who have any kind of visual problems like blurry vision, color-blindness etc. and for the people who get tired of reading after some time. Now open the e-book or website for which you want to use text-to-speech. Select the text you want to be read and click on the floating button named ‘Text-to-speech’. You will be prompted to select an app which has text-to-speech capability. After choosing the correct app, the text will be read by the app. You can also download a third-party app like @Voice Aloud Reader and set it as your default assist app for text-to-speech. This will greatly enhance the ease of using text-to-speech on your device. Don’t forget to configure the assist app by opening it and going to settings.

5. Conclusion

For people with learning disabilities or impaired vision, text-to-speech technology can be an incredibly useful tool, enabling the user to go online and still consume the information they seek. And for development and educational environments where it is inconvenient to wear headphones, TTS is a relatively non-invasive method of getting information from a computer. With Google’s new Text-to-Speech API, introduce a technology that is fast and efficient, high quality, and available to a wide range of Android devices. While the current lack of language and voice options is a bit of a downside, Google promises future extendibility to the API and will always offer updates to improve its quality. It offers a feature from Google that provides service that changes written text on webpage into speech. This service also has automatic language detection. With this powerful tool, you can listen to the text and finally understand by hearing the text as the same way it’s read. Advantages for this technology are not only confined to those with special needs. Even for normal users, it makes it easier to listen to a news article or blog you’ve found online while on the go. And a developer can add a feature to his app that enables the user to listen to the text of the app with a high quality voice, rather than a low budget robotic sound. As a quality engine is now available for all developers to use, it also means that it can be used by third party apps for translation services. With the fast growing demand of smartphone usage in today’s world, it’s certain that text-to-speech will be implemented widely throughout many applications in various environments. So if you are an Android customer and want a high quality TTS, make the switch to Google’s Text-to-Speech.