How do you specify what the Java application says?

You can use prerecorded speech or text-to-speech in a Java voice application by using any of the following subclasses of MediaType. These media classes specify the sounds that the caller hears:

• VoiceSegment specifies recorded voice data and is used both for output, and for input recorded from the user.
• DTMFSequence specifies a number of dual-tone multifrequency signals to be played.
• AudioCurrency specifies a currency amount to be spoken.
• AudioDate specifies a date to be spoken.
• AudioNumber specifies a number to be spoken.
• AudioString specifies a character string to be spoken.
• AudioTime specifies a time to be spoken.
• TextToSpeech specifies text from which speech is to be synthesized.
• MediaSequence is a composite of other MediaType objects.

You can also use arrays of MediaType objects to make a composite sequence of any of the media elements. All the methods capable of playing a message can accept arrays of MediaTypes. This allows your applications to play chains of MediaType objects in one operation.

You can make any data item presentable to the caller using the Playable interface. For example, the name, date of birth, and salary retrieved from an employee record in a database could be spoken as TextToSpeech, AudioDate and AudioCurrency items respectively.