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I release an app for people with disabilities to help them speak when they can't use their voice. I use android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech to generate speech in my app Android (Google and also Amazon), but it looks like Amazon is now blocking access to the speech synthesis engine in its latest version of FireOS (testing on a Kindle Fire 7 2022).

android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech => getVoices

now returns an empty list, where it didn't with prior versions of FireOS. I'd have given up completely, but the eSpeak app (com.reecedunn.espeak) when side-loaded shows the default OS engine ("English (United States.salli)") and can synthesize speech. That app hasn't been updated since 2015 so maybe it's just a legacy quirk, but since Amazon also doesn't seem to allow third-party TTS engines in their AppStore, I'm hitting a bit of a wall and looking for anything. The workaround is to use eSpeak, which is not nearly as good at the voices Amazon already has installed on the device. Has anyone else run into this, or have ideas what to try?

Brian Whitmer
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  • Have you tried other methods on `TextToSpeech`, such as `getDefaultVoice()` or `getEngines()`, to see what they return? Perhaps there's just something broken with `getVoices()`. – CommonsWare Oct 06 '22 at 22:36
  • Yes, they all return empty lists. It looks like I'm getting TextToSpeech#ERROR on the onInit callback, but I don't know how to get more details the error. – Brian Whitmer Oct 07 '22 at 01:05

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