Google’s Wear OS 4 devices are getting a new and improved text-to-speech (TTS) engine that aims to be faster and more reliable than the previous version. The latest TTS engine is designed to work well on low-memory devices, such as the Pixel Watch, OnePlus Watch 2, and Galaxy Watch 6, which only have 2GB of RAM.
According to 9to5Google, the new and faster text-to-speech (TTS) engine can synthesize speech in about 10 seconds after the device boots, and apps can pre-load it if they need quick access. Moreover, the improvement in speed is due to the help of less and more efficient machine learning (ML) models for prosody.
The new TTS engine can be incorporated into Wear OS apps using the same Android API as before. It can be used for a variety of purposes, such as “accessibility services, coaching prompts for exercise apps, navigation prompts, and reading incoming alerts out loud through the watch’s speaker or Bluetooth-connected headphones.” However, Google noted that the TTS engine is not meant for long texts like articles or podcasts.
According to the information, the new TTS engine for Wear OS 4 supports more than 50 languages, of which seven are pre-loaded in the system image, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. Smartwatch users can also download other languages while charging their watch by connecting it to Wi-Fi.