Connecting Families — Android’s Text-to-Speech
One Family — Multiple permutations of languages, scripts, and dialects
My son was born in the US but grew up in India for the first several years of his life. During this time, he learnt to speak and understand the Hindi language. But he never reached a point of learning to read the Hindi text (Devanagri).
My parents can manage to read some English but are most comfortable with reading, writing, and speaking in Hindi, Marwadi, and Marathi — all of these languages/dialects use the Devanagri script.
My siblings find it hard to type messages in the Devanagri script. So they often resort to transliteration by using the English script for typing messages in Marwadi.
As you can imagine, this can make it very challenging to communicate across the group with written text.
Owing to the geographical distribution of the family across countries, time-zones, and sleep patterns (yes, we do have teenagers in the family who are physically in one time-zone but maintain a pattern of a different time-zone) — we often communicate over a WhatsApp group. This group serves as our private channel for sharing the type of information that many people generally share on Facebook. Each individual ends up posting messages in a language/script combination that is easiest for them. Eventually a part of the group is left out from consuming all messages on the group. In particular, my son chases me down for reading out messages exchanged in any script or language that is not English — especially when it is in response to anything he posts on the group.
This was until I discovered Android’s best-in-class text-to-speech capabilities and its application for this use-case.
Connecting Families and Eliminating Communication Barriers
I have always used Android’s transliteration keyboard to type messages in Marwadi using the English alphabet. I have used speech to text for typing messages in Hindi with varying degrees of success. But what I discovered today is a killer use-case of Android’s text-to-speech functionality.
About a few months ago, I started using Android’s text-to-speech functionality to have it read-out articles in English while performing activities such as brushing or shaving. My son has wanted me to activate the functionality on “his” phone — a spare old phone with Android 5.1 on which we have setup WhatsApp under his name. I finally got around to enabling text-to-speech on his phone today — and I am mighty impressed by how it changes the communication dynamics. See for yourself below in a screengrab video where Android’s text-to-speech reads out messages across languages and scripts:
Now my son can hear messages posted in any language and script. Besides feeling more connected with family back in India, this will hopefully help fix his decaying skill in Hindi and Marwadi.
Enabling this Functionality on your Phone
Below are instructions for enabling text-to-speech that would more-or-less apply to most Android phones:
- Go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Select to Speak — and enable it
- Go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Text-to-speech output — and select the appropriate langauge as the “Default language”
- An additional icon will start appearing on the screen. Whenever you need to use the functionality, tap the icon and then drag on the section of the screen that you want to be read out
The exact title for the settings may vary slightly based on the Android version on your phone.
