I have seen Nick Landry’s session on implementing Text to Speech with Cortana and how you can add this small feature to your applications to add some really unique functionality. The issue of course is that each platform handles Text to Speech completely different. I have create a very simple yet flexible API allowing you to add Text to Speech functionality to: Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Windows Phone, and Windows Store.

GetInstalledLanguages

This was bonus perk really to add, which was the ability to gather all of the installed languages that are compatible with the Text To Speech engine on the platform. This allows you to manually set or allow your user to pick what language they want to speak back with. On Android this even takes advantage of the new Lollipop APIs!

Speak

My speak API allows you to simply pass in some text to speak back with all defaults, or really go to down and completely customize how the TTS engine plays back the sound. Here is what it looks like:

As you can see you have complete control over pitch, speak rate, locale, and even if you want to queue up the TTS engine or stop it completely. I am really proud to say that on Windows Phone/Store I use the complete Ssml engine to handle the advanced functionality, which is pretty slick.

Get It Today

The full source code is available today on GitHub along with full API documentation. Of course you can grab the NuGet as well and install it from Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio in a Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms project.

On my GitHub I have started to build out a lot of applications, sometimes using MvvmCross and sometimes not. One of my most starred repos is my MvvmCross plugin for saving settings on Android, iOS, WP, and Win 8. My idea originally was simple: Use the native settings management system across all platforms. This means SharedPreferences, NSUserDefaults, IsolatedStorageSettings, and ApplicationDataContainer. I didn’t want to do anything too crazy to re-invent the wheel, so this means you can only store data values that the platform allows such as:

• Boolean
• Int64
• String
• Single
• DateTime

Doing anything more then this to me means you should use some sort of blob storage such as Akavache. Since my library is very simple this means you can still use a PreferenceActivity on Android to get a nice native settings screen (this was my main motivation really). So it is great that I have MvvmCross support, but what about standard Xamarin projects?

Today, I am pleased to introduce a brand new GitHub repo called “Xam.PCL.Plugins”. This is a repo that is open source and will house all of my PCL NuGet Plugins for cross platform development. To start things off I am introducin my very first plugin, which as you might have guessed is cross platform settings! It is already available on NuGet for your app consumption :)

All you need to do is install the NuGet into both your PCL and client projects and you will be on your way! If you are interested in creating more plugins with me or converting MvvmCross plugins over simply fork my repo and send a pull request. You can use my settings project as an example of how to structure your project to work properly with PCLs. Additionally, PCLStorage is a great repo to also look at for starting development for a more advanced PCL.