Google improves text-to-speech (TTS) engine for Wear OS 4 devices

Google‘s Wear OS 4 devices are getting a new text-to-speech (TTS) engine, which promises to be faster and more reliable than the previous version. The new TTS engine is designed to work well on low-memory devices, such as the Pixel Watch and the Galaxy Watch 6, which have only 2 GB of RAM.

The new TTS engine of Wear OS 4 supports over 50 languages, with seven of them pre-loaded in the system image including English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. Users can also download other languages when they connect their watch to Wi-Fi and charge it.

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According to the information (via 9to5Google), the new TTS engine can synthesize speech in about 10 seconds after the device is booted, and apps can pre-load it if they need immediate access. The speed improvement is due to the use of smaller and more efficient machine learning (ML) models for prosody.

The new TTS engine can be integrated into Wear OS apps using the same Android APIs as before. It can be used for various purposes, such as accessibility services, exercise coaching, navigation, and reading-aloud notifications. However, Google mentioned that the TTS engine is not meant for long texts, such as articles or podcasts.