Google could be planning to get your smartphone to talk for you

Google IO 2019 starts in just a few days, and we're seeing more details trickle out about exactly what Google has in store at its big developer event – including a new feature aimed at people with speech impairments.

As 9to5Google notes, the events list for Google IO includes a mention of Project Euphoria, which is apparently "leveraging Google technologies to give people with speech impairments their voice back".

The session is being hosted by accessibility advocate Elise Roy and Harvard professor Michael Brenner, who is also a member of the Google Accelerated Science team.

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Join those various dots together and it sounds like Project Euphoria could be the latest accessibility feature to hit Android, perhaps with the Android Q roll out: and it's potentially going to get your smartphone to talk for you.

Wait and see

We've seen Google demonstrate voice synthesizer technologies before – at last year's Google IO event for example, when it showed off how it was adding new voices to the Google Assistant platform.

Project Euphoria is listed under an event called Designing for Accessibility, so it's not certain that this is a feature that's ready to go yet – it might be something that's launched further down the line.

It could also be a standalone device rather than an app or a feature built into Android, but we're betting that some kind of machine learning is involved somewhere.

We should hear more about this and plenty of other technologies and software that Google is working on when IO gets underway on May 7. As usual, we'll be bringing you all the news from the event.