Google releases massive update for Android’s text-to-speech feature

Google has rolled out a massive update to its Text-to-Speech Android app that includes a variety of enhancements. The update, which began rolling out to devices yesterday evening, bumps the app to version 3.0. Most notably, this update improves the voice functionality and quality. While the voice was originally rather robotic and boring, this update makes it more fluent and realistic, much like Apple did with Siri in iOS 7. 

I love Update Wednesdays, and today we’ve already seen pretty decent updates to several Google apps. As you’ve already seen,Google Play Games was updated to v1.5, but the one I’m excited about the most is, without a doubt, Google TTS v3.0, which made a jump today from v2.4. So, what’s so cool about TTS 3.0? First and foremost, Text-to-Speech 3.0 adds support for high quality voices. Just how drastic the difference is in day-to-day usage in various apps remains to be seen, but as far as file sizes go, we’re talking about a jump from 5-6MB to 200+MB. The female English UK voice is a whopping 276MB.