Google has announced the release of a new Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine for Wear OS 4. According to the company, it uses “decreased prosody ML models to bring faster synthesis on Wear OS devices.” Google further adds that it has tuned the new TTS engine to be “performant and reliable on low-memory devices.”
With that, the TTS functionality on Galaxy Watch 4, Watch 5, and Watch 6 models should work faster and consume fewer resources, resulting in better overall system performance and increased battery life. Google hasn’t said how it will offer the new TTS engine but we are expecting it to do that with the next system update.
According to Google, the new TTS engine will take 10 seconds to load after the device boots up. The company notes that it is meant for brief interactions, such as “accessibility services, coaching cues for exercise apps, navigation cues, and reading aloud incoming alerts through the watch speaker or Bluetooth connected headphones,” and therefore, “it shouldn’t be used for reading aloud a long article, or a long summary of a podcast.”
In the announcement post, Google says that the new TTS engine supports more than 50 languages and it comes pre-loaded with 7 languages by default: English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. However, OEMs can choose to offer a different set of languages. While setting up a smartwatch, if a user chooses a language that isn’t pre-loaded, the device will download it when it is on Wi-Fi and charging.
