It’s no secret that today is Update Wednesday, as we call it. We’ve already seen Google Play Games get updated, and now we’re seeing an update to Google TTS. Which most of you probably don’t care about. But for those that do, we’ve got the low down on everything that’s new with this update. It made the jump from v2.4 to v3.0.
The update brings in high-quality voices. And as expected, the download sizes are much larger. The older versions were only around 5MB in size, now the high-quality voices are around 200MB or larger. Just for kicks, the UK Female voice is 276MB. So that’s quite the different, but that’s what high-quality does.
Google also added a few more languages which includes Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish (US). There are also some UI tweaks. There is now a toggle added to each voice with two or more downloaded voice packs. So that you are able to switch to them on the fly. Previously the UI was not as flexible and only allowed downloading and deleting 5 languages. They’ve also changed the delete button to a trash can. Additionally, the voice pack sizes are now visible, before the UI only offered a download button without any other information. So that’s nice to have as well.
For those of you that are interested, we do have the APK. It’s about 12.6MB in size and we have the link down below. You can install it just like any other APK. Simply by enabling “Unknown Sources” in the Security settings of your phone, then hitting install and letting your phone do its thing. This is in a staged rollout, as usual, so if you can’t wait for Google to push the update out to you, you can download and install the APK. If you download the APK, let us know in the comments below how you like the update.