Making your AAC app Multilingual
As many of you know, due to my moderately severe speech impediment, I have been paying close attention to the development of Augmented Assistive Communication (AAC) devices/apps and Text to Speech Technology/Voice Engines. Those, who have paying attention to my articles through the years, may note, that as far as Text To Speech Voice Engine goes, I swear by IVONA, a Polish software company that was acquired by Amazon in 2012. And as far as reproducing human-like quality speech goes, IVONA Voice Engine is still second to none; however, while offering 23 High Quality European languages, the conspicuous absence of Asian Languages, even the major ones, such as Chinese Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean has left something to be desired. This is why, if one wants one’s AAC app to speak Asian languages, one has to turn to Google TTS. Most of you linguistic enthusiasts probably encountered Google Text to Speech Engine from Google Translation app and web services, and the