Emily Martin 
Mar 06, 2024
An undated image of Google Pixel Watch 2. — Google
The search engine giant Google has lifted the veil off an update of the Wear OS, the Wear OS 4, whose head-to-toe prowess seems to be existing in the text-to-speech (TTS) engine, making it faster and more reliable than that of the previous versions of Wear OS.
Better text-to-speech on Pixel Watch
The text-to-speech engine of the Wear OS 4 has been “tuned to be performant and reliable on low-memory devices,” considering that the installation of 2 GB RAM has become something conventional for the Pixel Watch and Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 6.
Faster speech synthesis on smartwatches
While having been augmented in the Wear OS 4, the text-to-speech engine would now make speech synthesis faster than before, reducing the time to around 10 seconds after the required boot for the device has been executed to synthesise speech with efficacy.
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In case wearables need instant access to utilise speech synthesis, they can evade undergoing a device boot through certain tools. Meanwhile, courtesy of the enhanced speech synthesis goes to “decreased prosody ML models.”
Languages supported on smartwatches with Wear OS 4
For ordinary users having smartwatches running on Wear OS 4, there will be seven pre-loaded languages in the system image, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. However, manufacturers would be able to choose from 50 different languages supported.
The noteworthy improvement is that if a different system language is picked while setting up the smartwatch, the “watch automatically downloads the corresponding voice file the first time the user connects to Wi-Fi while charging their watch.”
Use cases include “accessibility services, coaching cues for exercise apps, navigation cues, and reading aloud incoming alerts through the watch speaker or Bluetooth connected headphones.”
The TTS engine is “meant for brief interactions” and not “reading aloud a long article, or a long summary of a podcast,” the company stated in the official notes for the Wear OS 4.
