text to speech - Japanese TTS on Android

Question

I'm interested in performing Japanese speech synthesis on Android. The guide on Android TTS says:

"The TTS engine that ships with the Android platform supports a number of languages: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish."

Yet I see an app that does Japanese TTS, and the APK is around 1 MB - not nearly enough for a standalone TTS library.

So the question is: does Android TTS support Japanese in principle (e. g. as downloadable resources)? What about Japanese phones?

Answer 1

Found three Japanese-capable third party engines. All available on the Market and paid.

• SVOX Classic with SVOX Japanese Voice installed ($3)
• AquesTalk ($2)
• DTalker TTS ($12, but a free demo is available)

On Android 2.2, once you enable them in settings, they become available to third party apps.

On Android 1.6 to 2.1, you have to download a free utility called "TTS Services Extended", which basically backports the same, and you have to use its stub JAR instead of the SDK's TextToSpeech class. So it's all perfectly doable, if the customer is willing to spend some.