Discover the core Android API for Speech Recognition.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

Android devices are ubiquitous and contain a lot of technologies that may help to build a rich experience for your users, one of these technologies is Speech Recognition, a lot of applications work with the user speech to provide new features like responding to commands, translating a phrase from language to language instead of typing it, and an innumerable list of other things. In this article, we will shed light on this technology and try to clarify how you can integrate it into your android applications to provide a great experience for your users.

This article assumes that you have some experience building Android apps with Kotlin Programming Language.

There are two main methods you can implement Speech To Text (STT) in Android Applications, the first one is throughout Google Dialog arising in each time you want to take user speech, whereas the second is without this dialog but it requires more code to accomplish the speech recognition.

Project Setup

The first thing to do is to add the required permissions in the AndroidManifest file in order to access this functionality, these permissions are the RECORD_AUDIO and the INTERNET, RECORD_AUDIO permission is a critical one, which means that you will need to ask for it in the runtime (Android Marshmallow API 23 and…