How can I play a test voice guidance sentence with the same voice as NMANavigationManager (HERE SDK)?

Question

I'm developing an iOS project in Xcode using the Here SDK. I'm using the Premium Edition (v3.17). In the 'Settings' screen of my app users can choose the 'voice' that's being used by the SDK (I get that list through NMAVoiceCatalog voicePackages property.)

I would like to play a small sentence when users select a voice (E.g. "Turn right now"), so that they get immediate feedback if they like that voice or not.

Now, I know that NMAAudioManager has a method playOutput which will play either a prerecorded sound file or a tts string. That's great, but now for my question:

How can I make sure the NMAAudioManager.sharedInstance().play( method, plays with the same voice as NMANavigationManager?

It's important to note the difference between tts voices and pre-recorded voices here.

Pre-recorded voices I imagine this is a resource package of pre-recorded mp3 or wav files. I just need to know the url of a sound file or sound files that I could use. E.g. the sound file(s) for the sentence "turn right now". I imagine the filename is the same for all voices in all languages (Not sure though). Is there a list of available sound files and their names? Or could you give me a few sound file names (and URL's within the SDK) so I can play them as test sound through NMAAudioManager?

tts voices For those voices I could create a sentence in each supported language and feed that to the NMAAudioManager.sharedInstance().play( method. I would create an 'NMATTSAudioOutput' for that sentence. However, I need to set the correct AVSpeechSynthesisVoice to the voice property of that 'NMATTSAudioOutput' instance. With correct I mean the same AVSpeechSynthesisVoice that the NMANavigationManager is using. I've tried using AVSpeechSynthesisVoice(language: voicePackage.languageCode) but that doesn't give the same AVSpeechSynthesisVoice than the one that NMANavigationManager uses. E.g. English UK tts voicePackage plays with English US AVSpeechSynthesisVoice. Could you share with me how the NMANavigationManager chooses the AVSpeechSynthesisVoice from NMAVoicePackage properties?

Answer 1

Pre-recorded voices

The best way to get a sample is to use HERE SDK. As voice service URL can be changed in future. Install voice package (id:83101) from catalog and find wav files in your app directory:

/Documents/heremaps/diskcache/voices/es-MX_male/mexican_male/g5turns_left_002e

HERE SDK initialises AVAudioPlayer with wav file content and calls play() function.

TTS voices

NMANavigationManager uses something similar:

NMATTSAudioOutput *output = [NMATTSAudioOutput audioOutputWithText:text];
output.source = NMAAudioOutputSourceGuidance;
output.voice = [AVSpeechSynthesisVoice voiceWithLanguage:self.voicePackage.languageCode];
output.speechRate = AVSpeechUtteranceDefaultSpeechRate;
output.pitchMultiplier = 1.0;

[[NMAAudioManager sharedAudioManager] playOutput:output];

Note, there are many lua scripts and algorithms behind the scene which makes voice guidance smooth and advanced.