TextToSpeech Android does not work regularily

Question

I am trying to find out why my app does not work as expected. To find out why, I have created a small project with a single Activity where if you press a button, predefined words are supposed to be spoken. I am using a Sony Xperia Compact Android 9. I made some system update lately, can that be a reason?

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.speech.tts.TextToSpeech;
import android.speech.tts.UtteranceProgressListener;

import android.support.design.widget.FloatingActionButton;
import android.support.design.widget.Snackbar;
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity;
import android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.MenuItem;

import java.util.Locale;

public class MainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {
    private TextToSpeech textToSpeech;
    private boolean isInitialized = false;
    private MainActivity mainActivity;
    int ctr = 0;
    private String words[] = {"handboll", "kula", "golf"};
    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
        Toolbar toolbar = findViewById(R.id.toolbar);
        setSupportActionBar(toolbar);
        mainActivity = this;

        textToSpeech = new TextToSpeech(this, new TextToSpeech.OnInitListener() {
            @Override
            public void onInit(int status) {
                if (status == TextToSpeech.SUCCESS){
                    textToSpeech.setOnUtteranceProgressListener(new UtteranceProgressListener() {
                        @Override
                        public void onStart(String utteranceId) {
                            System.out.println("---onStart");
                        }

                        @Override
                        public void onDone(String utteranceId) {
                            System.out.println("-----onDone");
                        }

                        @Override
                        public void onError(String utteranceId) {
                            System.out.println("-----onError");
                        }

                        @Override
                        public void onError(String utteranceId, int errorCode){
                            onError(utteranceId);
                            System.out.println("Error with code: " + errorCode);
                        }
                    });
                    isInitialized = true;
                    Locale locale = new Locale("sv");
                    textToSpeech.setLanguage(locale);
                }
            }
        });
        FloatingActionButton fab = findViewById(R.id.fab);
        fab.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View view) {

                if (isInitialized){
                    System.out.println(textToSpeech.getLanguage().getDisplayLanguage());
                    textToSpeech.speak(words[ctr], TextToSpeech.QUEUE_FLUSH, null, "SpeakTest");
                    ctr++;
                    ctr %= words.length;
                } else {
                    Snackbar.make(view, "Speaker not ready", Snackbar.LENGTH_LONG)
                            .setAction("Action", null).show();
                }
            }
        });

    }
}

What happens is that only a few of the words are spoken when I press the button. For example, in this case only handboll and kula could be said but not golf. In other cases kula could not be said.

Then I created the array {"kula", "kula", "kula"} and pressed the button maybe 100 times, then suddenly it started to work. So obviously it can speak the words, but it does not always happen when I press the button.

For the Locale object, I have tried sv, sv-SV and swe, all with the same result.

If I use english and en, it works fine.

Answer 1

I had the same problem with Thai in Ankidroid. Usually no speech but if I use gestures to repeat the speech often enough it sometimes worrks. English works fine. I uninstalled the updates for Google text to speech and it works again.