I would like to develop an app that uses TTS for many languages. The problem is that only few languages come with specific devices, depending on the country I suppose (I'm talking about PICO). Is there a way to use a TTS engin embedded in my apk or find somewhere online the missing PICO files and put them in the apk... or any other solution to support languages but present in the device by default?
Read this article: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/09/introduction-to-text-to-speech-in.html
There is an intent (action - ACTION_INSTALL_TTS_DATA) which automatically will download required languages.
Also, I believe you can do two things:
a) Implement your own service based on http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/tts/TextToSpeechService.html).
b) You can load some custom files using API - addEarcon(String earcon, String filename)
(http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/tts/TextToSpeech.html)
Related
I am working on an application where it is required that I have to change.update string resources declared in my String.xml file over the air without uploading a new version on stores. (From server)
Currently, it is already implemented by Localazy and Phrase Android SDK.
The client wants to update anything declared in the String.xml and for every local.
I have to do it for multiple languages. I have already implemented localization. But the app still requires dynamic changes in the String resources,
As the author of this technology at Localazy, I can explain it pretty well.
How do we change strings.xml on the fly? We don't.
Our Gradle plugin adds a library to your app, performs bytecode analysis, and routes all the relevant method calls through our library. The library itself acts as a proxy, updates its internal strings database from our servers, and serves updated strings whenever possible. It also calculates anonymous stats about string usage, etc., to optimize the translation process on the Localazy site.
All of this happens during the build time without ever touching your source code and resources. It's completely transparent.
While it sounds like a simple task, it's much more complicated as it's impossible to route all method calls easily. E.g., LayoutInflater uses a different method for obtaining strings, and the same applies to Preferences, Menus, etc.
We also download and merge your strings.xml with the latest translations available on Localazy as the standard system method is always a reasonable fallback. We must correctly handle edge cases such as language aliases (iw vs. he), RTL languages, etc.
One of the biggest challenges was correctly supporting build types, product flavors, libraries, and dynamic app modules. It's not just about serving strings from the internal database but selecting the right one. E.g., a string with the same key from a library has lower priority than the app's one. The situation is different for dynamic app modules.
We've designed Localazy to handle all of these situations from the ground - the library, how we store strings on our servers, etc.
It's not a simple task to do this correctly, so better use the existing solution if possible.
Feel free to ask me if you need further help.
It is a tedious task to localize app's for multiple languages, and very often the same work is done over and over again:
For example, phrases like "OK", "Cancel" are in almost every android app.
Localization of mobile apps - Any resources available for the basics?
This question is 3 years old, I wonder if anything changed since then.
Are there any comprehensive libraries/collections which take care of this? So that I only have to translate the actually app-specific strings?
I would suggest using the Google Translator Toolkit. It supports the various localization files. It also has support for iOS and Android localization files.
Example: For Android you can upload your strings.xml you can select to which files you want to get it translated. It is automatically translated by Google Translate. It uses different colors to display how sure Google Translate is about the translation, and gives feedback about things that needs to be changed in the translations.
You can also use a translation memory. This is a database with saved translations. You can create a personal Translation memory. This contains all the translations you made. You can also use the global TM.
The global TM saves and stores translations from Translator Toolkit users everywhere. Please note that the global TM is available for anyone to see and use.
You read more about it on the support page
It has an editor build in which allows you to change the automatically translated words/sentences. You can export the translations as strings.xml again, so you can use them straightaway in your Android project.
A disadvantage: I don't think it is possible to switch between localization formats, so you have to translate all sentences for both the iOS and Android version.
You can read more about it on the support page
I know how develop a multilingual app in Android.
The following link explains how to do so.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/localization.html
Assume that I release to the market my app in 3 different languages developed with the best practices described in the link above in mind.
If I want to add a new language I have to republish a new version. Is there a good way to avoid republishing the app if I add more languages?
It is important that the application detects the correct language according to the language of the smartphone.
If you are using the standard localization framework then the answer is no, because all the localization files are looked up in the res folder at runtime. And to update the res folder, you need to update the apk.
The only possible way to do what you want is by coding your own localization framework, which, intuitively, should not be too hard. (Your have a function that searches for a string in a file, and the file is determined by the language). The bad thing is that you would need to set all the strings on your user interface objects programmatically.
I'm writing a cross platform app (Store App and Android) with MvvmCross. In his helpfull webcasts, Stuart Lodge shows how to use Picture Chooser Plugin to select an image from the device library. But, what about other types of files (text, xml and so on)? With a IMvxFileStore object it's possible to read text and binary files, but how to choose them?
There isn't a ready made solution for this that I know of - and 2 key mobile platforms really won't provide this (winphone and ios don't really do filepickers)
However, if you wanted to implement your own file picker interface on droid, wpf and winstore then it should be relatively easy to do:
define an interface in your core project
implement the interface in wpf and winstore using common dialogs
implement the picker in droid using simple directory listing code (or some 3rd party component)
register the components during app setup
There's an n+1 video on injecting services and plugins which may help.
I am .NET developer and currently working with WPF and ASP.NET MVC 4. The next project I should start will be a web application with good chance to later create clients for desktop/mobile/tablets. In other words, this application could be used from the web browser but also from native applications on Android, iOS, WinPhone8 and Windows Desktop (WPF). I have very limited experience with iOS development and none with Android dev.
One of the features I plan to have in this product is ability for users to select a language on which they want to use GUI, be it in web browser or any other client. Thus I need to create localization solution that would work with all platforms I plan to support. Since I am starting this project with first creating the web app in ASP.NET MVC I am not interested in using Microsoft's default support for localization via resources files (.resx) since that wouldn't be portable.
What are different options out there for creating multi-language support in apps deployed for various platforms? The first idea is to use XML files but I am also interested in exploring other possible solutions that might already exist out there. Any ideas on how to approach this problem are welcome.
First of all I'm not sure if your question should be addressed to the Android and iOs developers (using the iOs and Android tags) because if the client loads content provided by the server then the most common way to do this localization (i encountered very often) is to provide different URL's for different languages, probably with a parameter in the url, something like wwww.yourserver.com/en_us/otherstuffhere where en_us should be the country code and in this way the client can change the URL that will use for the following requests.
Of course it's rely hard to localize all the app using a server content, especially UI components such as button titles, placeholders etc. for these there are proper ways to localize them using iOS and Android OS features for localization.
P.S I have no idea how Windows phone OS works.
As far as I know, there is nothing really out there that would do what you want.
Most systems work well with JSON.
What you could do, is use any of the .resx to JSON solutions that are out there and just store all your localization strings in resx and then automatically convert them to JSON for other platforms.
Forget about one solution, just use whatever format the plattform offers and use a tool like Trados or Transifex to manually convert the different formats.
I'd recommend to use whatever format given platform has native, otherwise you will cause you lot of extra troubles.
You can then either use some tools to convert and merge these formats (translate-toolkit is great in this) or use some translation platform which will allow you to translate all of them in one interface. Transifex (service), Crowdin (service) or Weblate (service or instalable) should be able to do this.
Weblate can help you also with keeping them in sync, I don't think others have such feature (I'm author of Weblate).