It's a fact, we can't help smiling when someone orders a drink in Spanish with a very strong English accent, the same way English people smile when I ask for directions with my Spanish accent. However, we really appreciate their effort speaking a foreign language.
I wanted to know how would people react if they had an app to recreate these international accents and share them with their friends. That is why I spent 8.5h developing Xtegos, an Android app that enables users to read any text with nine different accents and share the result as a voice message on Whatsapp.
The interface is extremely simple, literally a text box, nine voice selectors, a button to listen and another one to share on Whatsapp. In the backend I am using Android TTS after trying out some other free text-to-speech APIs. The best thing about this native voice synthesizer is that you can use it even offline.
The voices currently available are: English, French, German, Brazilian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Indian and Japanese. All of them are female voices, and the selector buttons are illustrated with innocent stereotype pictures.
This MVP (minimum viable product) is completed with a website, a Google Play page, a Twitter account and a Facebook page (to engage with early-adopters). Some people have asked me to develop an iOS version but, unfortunately, I cannot do that until the value proposition is validated or I would spend too much time maintaining both systems. The same applies to the app language: if it doesn't work for Spanish, it probably won't work in any other language.
This week I am devoting some time to promote Xtegos among my initial customer segment: Spanish boys and girls from 16 to 25 years old with Whatsapp. I will post in this blog what I learn in these experiments and the pivots I make.
Is there any feature that you would like to see implemented? Your feedback, questions and ideas are very much appreciated.
The interface is extremely simple, literally a text box, nine voice selectors, a button to listen and another one to share on Whatsapp. In the backend I am using Android TTS after trying out some other free text-to-speech APIs. The best thing about this native voice synthesizer is that you can use it even offline.
The voices currently available are: English, French, German, Brazilian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Indian and Japanese. All of them are female voices, and the selector buttons are illustrated with innocent stereotype pictures.
This MVP (minimum viable product) is completed with a website, a Google Play page, a Twitter account and a Facebook page (to engage with early-adopters). Some people have asked me to develop an iOS version but, unfortunately, I cannot do that until the value proposition is validated or I would spend too much time maintaining both systems. The same applies to the app language: if it doesn't work for Spanish, it probably won't work in any other language.
Is there any feature that you would like to see implemented? Your feedback, questions and ideas are very much appreciated.