Cordova Text To Speech Plugin

Recently in one of our project we added Cordova Text To Speech using following plugin.

https://github.com/PluginCordova/cordova-plugin-tts

But during the development I faced certain issues so in this blog I am going to explain it.

1) It does not work in first attempt.

This plugin depends on Android Text to Speech class

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/tts/TextToSpeech.html

And for that you need sample voice in the phone. If you are using this feature first time then first it will download sample voice from the android server. So let it get downloaded and then try it again.

2) Maximum Character Limit

There is limit of 32, 768 characters. If your string is bigger than this, it won't work. In this case split your text to smaller chunks and play it one by one like playlist.

3) It does not stop after start playing.

With the above plugin it does not stop playing. The reason is stop method is not implemented at all in this plugin.

So you have to make two changes for it.

First open tts.js file in plugins folder and exports.stop = function ()

There check for the following line.

cordova
.exec(function () {
if (promise) {
promise.resolve();
}
}, function (reason) {
}, 'TTS', 'stop');

Here the third param options is not passed so it will give JavaScript error. Change above code to.

cordova
.exec(function () {
if (promise) {
promise.resolve();
}
}, function (reason) {
}, 'TTS', 'stop',[]);

Now go to TTS.java file in src folder of your android project and look for the following method.

public boolean execute(String action, JSONArray args, CallbackContext callbackContext)

It does not have stop implementation.

Remove code of the function and use following code.

if (action.equals("speak")) {
speak(args, callbackContext);
} else if (action.equals("stop")){
Log.v("stop","stop speaking");
tts.stop();
}else{
return false;
}
return true;

That's it and it should work now.