Android TextToSpeech API with Xamarin: it talks too!

A recent post covered Apple's new text-to-speech API in iOS 7, but forgot to mention that Android has actually had this capability for a while! It's really easy to add text-to-speech to a Xamarin.Android app: just implement TextToSpeech.IOnInitListener (which is a single method: OnInit) then create a new TextToSpeech instance:

speaker = new TextToSpeech (this, this);

and call Speak:

void Speak(string text) {
   var p = new Dictionary ();
   speaker.Speak (text, QueueMode.Flush, p);
}

The TaskyPro sample code has been updated so that both the iOS and Android apps have a Speak button. The Android app looks like this:

Check out this cool TtsSetup sample for Xamarin (via StackOverflow) for more details on how to customize the Android TextToSpeech API.