The cohort and speechify libraries for rapid construction of speech enabled applications for Android

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of libraries that provide speech recognition and text-tospeech synthesis "in the cloud", it remains difficult for developers to create user-friendly, consistent spoken language interfaces to their mobile applications. In this paper, we present the Speechify/Cohort libraries for rapid speech enabling of Android applications. The Speechify library wraps several publicly available speech recognition and synthesis APIs, incorporates state-of-the-art voice activity detection and simple and flexible hybrid speech recognition, and allows developers to experiment with different modes of user interaction. The Cohort library, built on a stripped-down version of OpenDial, facilitates flexible interaction between and within "Speechified" mobile applications.