Android Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech - How to voice-enable your mobile application

"What does a weasel look like?" We are taking a closer look at Android's Speech-To-Text (STT) and Text-To-Speech (TTS) capabilities - and will develop and deploy three small apps, each a little more capable, and finally walk through the steps of building a voice controlled assistant. Android uses Google's Speech-To-Text engine in the cloud but has Text-To-Speech capabilities baked right into Android since Android 2.0 (Donut), using SVOX Pico with six language packages (US and UK English, German, French, Italian and Spanish). While Speech Recognition, Interpretation, and Text-To-Speech Synthesizer are addressed by phone equipment- and OS makers, the core problem of how to capture knowledge and make it accessible to smart software agents is ignored and all service like SIRI or Google Voice Actions remain closed, i.e. not easily extendable with 3rd party information/knowledge.