How can I control how Android TTS plays audio

Question

I have a class that uses the Android TTS API to transcribe text to audio. I can control the pitch and speed; but I noticed the engine requires a text string and also a hash object. I noticed some words are pronounced too quickly to be easily recognized, and inflection seems too unnatural. Is there a way I can control these two things; possibly through the HashMap? The following is how I'm using the engine:

    mTts = new TextToSpeech(Globals.context, this); // context, listener
}

@Override
public void onInit(int status) {
    HashMap<String, String> myHashRender = new HashMap();
    myHashRender.put(TextToSpeech.Engine.KEY_PARAM_UTTERANCE_ID, speech);
    mTts.setPitch(0.8f);
    mTts.setSpeechRate(0.6f);
    mTts.synthesizeToFile(speech, myHashRender, fileOutPath);
    while (mTts.isSpeaking()) try {
        Thread.sleep(100);
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    mTts.stop();
    mTts.shutdown();

Answer 1

Google TTS does not currently support that, but here is what you can do: During parsing of your text, you can change parts of it to get the intonation and inflection you want.

For example, if you encounter the word 'Hey' you rewrite it on the fly to 'Heeeey' before you send it to the TTS engine to get a different pronounciation.

It is not pretty but it is a workaround.