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I am building an app that converts text messages to speech and sends them to the destination. At the other end, the speech is converted back to text messages.

I imagine it may be easy with Twilio but I don't want to use internet connection. A simple call should be enough to transmit the data.

Any idea on how I should proceed with this?

Gaurav Agarwal
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  • Can `Twilio` convert speech to text and vice versa and how you are planning to transmit data with a phone call? – Gaurav Agarwal May 31 '12 at 16:23
  • Apparently yes. Check their docs. This is the challenging part. The sms should be converted to speech before transmitting as a phone call and possibly add some data to it to tell the other phone that it should be decrypted to text (i.e the other phone needs to fire up my decryption app). Transmitting data is like a normal phone call. My question is, does the SDK allow me to make phone call to other phones? –  May 31 '12 at 16:37
  • You can edit your question to incorporate you comment. Nowhere in the Twilio docs it says it can convert text to speech and vice versa. – Gaurav Agarwal May 31 '12 at 16:45
  • http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/twilio-client-text-to-speech –  May 31 '12 at 16:49
  • ok, I stand corrected but how will Twilio handle the different accent of speech people have across the world and what about 100's of languages people use all across the world? – Gaurav Agarwal May 31 '12 at 16:59

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I don't think this is really possible to do, your tasks would be pretty heavy ...

  1. TTS- that's no problem android has a library for that TTS and recording it

  2. Make a phone call and monitor state Make phone call monitor state

  3. Send your synthesized message - can't quite find a way to do this, seems problematic sending recorded messages over phone network it has been suggested that you could play the recording over the speaker and the microphone might pick that up, seems like a good way to introduce even more errors into the system though

  4. On the other end something must answer - Answering a phone call

  5. Record incoming call - this seems to be highly problematic on a non-rooted phone Recording incoming calls? or Recording incoming calls

  6. Take the recording and do reliable STT without the benefit of a server back end, also highly problematic since the translation errors even on high end server apps are sometimes quite comical

So without a rooted phone with a custom rom I don't think all of this is possible even if you could overcome the poor quality of a double translation TTS -> STT

Twillo seems to be about making calls over the net vs. the phones digital network not about sending text (in essence) over a phone connection

Seems like a whole lot of extra work just to avoid an internet connection charge (of about 2 seconds and few bytes!)

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