text to speech - Android TTS male voices

Question

Is it possible to install and configure some male voices on android.speech.tts.Voice? I have read some news that Android had made some available recently, but I can't find or configure any. All the ones that I try with command tts.setLanguage(Locale.ITALY); are female.

Answer 1

No, not at present. An enhancement request is needed so that the gender can be included in the Voice Feature Set, such that:

Voice[Name: en-AU-afi-network, locale: en_AU, quality: 500, latency: 400, requiresNetwork: true, features: [networkTimeoutMs, networkRetriesCount, male]]

I have sent emails to Text to Speech providers about including this - as waiting for an enhancement from Google is probably years away.

All you can do in the mean time, is hard-code the name of the engine with a reference to the gender. It's time consuming and there's no guarantee that they won't change the name.... Needs must for me.