teaching machines

Hello World Post Mortem

December 19, 2014 by . Filed under cs436, fall 2014, postmortems.

We completed the postmortem of the Hello World app with 3 achievements in mind: utilizing Androids Text To Speech Engine after Chris’s demonstration with Simon Says, but have it say “Hello —-” in the corresponding language its in and whatever string name. Utilizing androids built in language library, we implemented this into Spanish, German, and English as we could verify it was translating correctly, and finally we wanted to ensure our changes to language settings persisted with our android device, satisfying our persisting requirement.

We were successful in implementing all three details, and included screenshots on our talking phone app, but the text to speech engine/persisting/language items proved interesting to implement due to us working on different parts of the app with different IDE’s and learning that although it’s all android, it plays differently on android studio vs eclipse. Trying to go and re-implement sections that just were misbehaving became a large pain, but other than that, the implementations were surprisingly smooth as butter.

Persisting and language settings in android practically go hand in hand, and surprisingly the text to speech functionality has built in responsive behavior with the language settings of android, and the engine replies back in whatever native language library it’s drawing from depending on the settings. Initially we were worried this would be a complex venture, but it came out surprisingly easy in this regard!

We’ve attached screenshots of the app in action between switching from English to German as a small demo of the language and persist of the app after reboot, but were unable to find a good way to demo sound on twodee although we have that working as well.

Now, no one should be forever alone

English persistence:

engscreen1 (1)

engscreen2

German persistance:

gerscreen1

gerscreen2

gerscreen3