Does Android TTS support Speech Synthesis Markup Language?

Question

Passing the following SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) document to the com.svox.pico TextToSpeech engine resulted in a reading of the XML body but no control from the phoneme element or the emphasis element. This result (no apparent SSML control) is the same on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 as well as on the emulator running an AVD with SDK level 8.

            String text = "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>" +
                "<speak version=\"1.0\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/10/synthesis\" " +
                    "xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" " +
                    "xsi:schemaLocation=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/10/synthesis " +
                        "http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/synthesis.xsd\" " +
                    "xml:lang=\"en-US\">" +

                    "tomato " +
                    "<phoneme alphabet=\"ipa\" ph=\"t&amp;#x259;mei&amp;#x325;&amp;#x27E;ou&amp;#x325;\"> tomato </phoneme> " +

                    "That is a big car! " +
                    "That <emphasis> is </emphasis> a big car! " +
                    "That is a <emphasis> big </emphasis> car! " +
                    "That is a huge bank account! " +
                    "That <emphasis level=\"strong\"> is </emphasis> a huge bank account! " +
                    "That is a <emphasis level=\"strong\"> huge </emphasis> bank account!" +
                "</speak>";
            mTts.speak(text, TextToSpeech.QUEUE_ADD, null);

Does any Android TTS engine support any of the SSML elements?

Answer 1

I've been experimenting with SSML and it seems that the TTS engine wraps its input automaticly with the root <speak> element, so if you leave it out, then it works fine and you don't get a parser error.

Example:

String text = "Testing <phoneme alphabet=\"xsampa\" ph=\"&#34;{k.t@`\"/>.";
mTts.speak(text, TextToSpeech.QUEUE_ADD, null);