Xamarin.Forms - Text To Speech Using Xamarin Essentials

Introduction

Xamarin.Essentials

Xamarin.Essentials provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications. Android, iOS, and UWP offer unique operating system and platform APIs that developers have access to all in C# leveraging Xamarin. Xamarin.Essentials provides a single cross-platform API that works with any Xamarin.Forms, Android, iOS, or UWP application that can be accessed from shared code no matter how the user interface is created.

Text-to-Speech

This enables an application to utilize the built-in text-to-speech engines to speak back text from the device and also to query available languages that the engine can support.

Coding Part

Steps

1. 1: Creating new Xamarin.Forms Projects
2. 2: Implementation of Text to Speech in Xamarin Forms

Step 1: Creating new Xamarin.Forms Projects

Create New Project by selecting "New Project" à "Xamarin Cross Platform App" and Clicking "OK". Note: Xamarin.Forms version should be greater than 5.0.

Then Select Android and iOS Platforms as shown below with Code Sharing Strategy as PCL or .Net Standard and Click OK.

Step 2: Implementation of Text to Speech in Xamarin Forms

In this step, we will see how to implement the functionality in Xamarin.Forms.

Platform Specific Changes:

• If your project's Target Android version is set to Android 11 (R API 30) you must update your Android Manifest with queries that are used with the new package visibility requirements.
• Open the AndroidManifest.xml file under the Properties folder and add the following inside of the manifest node:

Xamarin Forms App Changes:

• Add a reference to Xamarin.Essentials in your class:
• Text-to-Speech works by calling the SpeakAsync method with text and optional parameters, and returns after the utterance has finished.
• This API provide more options on how the audio is spoken back with SpeechOptions that allows setting the volume, pitch, and locale.

Full Code

Result

Download Code:

You can download the code from GitHub. If you have any doubts, feel free to post a comment. If you liked this article, and it is useful to you, do like, share the article & star the repository on GitHub.