Give Your Sport Tracking App a Brand New Voice

If you’re using an Android or iPhone sports tracking app with voice cues, then you know the built in text to speech (TTS) engine sounds a bit dull and robotic. Enter SVOX Classic Text To Speech (TTS) Engine, available in the Android Market and App Store. SVOX’s HQ voices are an enormous improvement over the stock TTS engines and are served up in 25 languages, some with more than one to choose from. Once installed and set up properly with your particular voice of choice, any application which uses TTS (sports tracking, navigation, ebook reader, etc.) will suddenly sound better, almost to the point of natural.

I’m using SportsTrackLive’s SportsTracker Pro for my daily running and no other Android sport-tracking app has as many convenient audio cue options. However, the more I rely upon current stats being fed to my head through earbuds, the more weary I grow of the characterless, female voice of Android. The standard voice isn’t all that bad, but it’s just boring enough so that you consider limiting it’s use over time. Until I discovered what SVOX had to offer, I didn’t realize I had the option to change my Android’s voice so easily. There’s no hacking involved at all.

Begin by installing the SVOX Classic app (free), open it and check out the voice samples before you download them. Once you chosen your narrator’s voice, proceed into Settings>Voice input & output>Text-to-speech settings, scroll down and tick Svox Classic TTS’s box. Then tweak your Svox settings and scroll back up to Default Engine and tick Svox Classic TTS. Eh, though I’d like one, I don’t have an iPhone so no instructions here. It should be equally as simple as Android’s setup is.

I’ve chosen a couple voice cues from SportsTracker Pro and recorded the outputs using stock Android and SVOX Classic TTS engines. Both samples use a UK female voice. (All SVOX voices cost between $2 and $3.)

If you run into any installation problems, leave a comment and I’ll try to help. Have fun!

Pico TTS sample SVOX Classic TTS sample

QR for Svox at AppBrain.com