Openears asking for permission to use microphone

Question

I have made an app that uses Openears framework to readout some text. But I haven't used any of Openears' speech recognition/speech synthesis features, just the talk to speech feature. My app got rejected by apple telling that the app asks for permission to use microphone while the app doesn't have any features of that kind. The following is the rejection message from apple:

During review we were prompted to provide consent to use the microphone, however, we were not able to find any features or functionality that use the microphone for audio recording.

The microphone consent request is generated by the use of either AVAudioSessionCategoryRecord or AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayAndRecord audio categories. 

If you do not intend to record audio with your application, it would be appropriate to choose the AVAudioSession session category that fits your application's needs or modify your app to include audio-recording features.

For more information, please refer to the Security section of the iOS SDK Release Notes for iOS 7 GM Seed.

I have searched the app for AVAudioSessionCategoryRecord or AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayAndRecord audio categories as mentioned in the message but couldn't find any. How can I disable the prompting for permission to use microphone?

Answer 1

Your application got rejected because you don't need the microphone feature, openears by default interface with the use of the microphone feature hence why the user permissions came up. These user permissions are not dismissible as apple increased the security features for users so that they can be in more control of what they want their applications to be able to do. If you have to use OpenEars audio management feature for speech recognition see Update 1 otherwise continue on for a different solution using Apples Siri's Speech Synthesizer on iOS 7.

In your case, if all you want to do is read out some text, then you can use iOS7 Speech Synthesizer, which is the same synthesizer used to create Siri's voice.

It's SO easy to setup and I am currently using it for one of my projects to interact with the user via voice. Here's a quick tutorial on how to get it all setup:

Speech synthesizer tutorial

UPDATE 1

After @halle's comment, I decided to update the post for those that have to use the OpenEars framework who will be using only the FliteController Text To Speech feature without any sort of OpenEars speech recognition.

You can set the FliteController property noAudioSessionOverrides to TRUE so that you ensure that OpenEars wont interface with the Audio recording stream and this will stop the Microphone permissions alert from popping up.

[self.fliteController setNoAudioSessionOverrides:TRUE]

UPDATE 2 Based on @Halle's comment, you no longer need to do update 1:

Just an update that starting with today's update 1.65, FliteController won't ever make audio session calls on its own, so there is no further rejection danger here and it isn't necessary to set noAudioSessionOverrides.

Answer 2

I'm sorry your app was rejected. To use TTS only without any of the audio session management related to speech recognition in OpenEars, set FliteController's property noAudioSessionOverrides to TRUE. This will result in no audio session changes/no use of the mic stream.

I'll see if I can make the documentation for this setting a bit more prominent for developers doing TTS with OpenEars' FliteController only.

For completeness' sake, the documentation on how to greatly reduce your app binary size when using OpenEars, since that was also an issue for you:

http://www.politepix.com/forums/topic/slimming-down-your-app/ http://www.politepix.com/openears/support/#Q_How_can_I_trim_down_the_size_of_the_final_binary_for_distribution

Edit: starting with today's version 1.65 of OpenEars and its plugins, if you just use FliteController there is no danger of rejection because the TTS classes no longer make any calls to the audio session by themselves. Thanks for the heads-up about this and, again, sorry you had a rejection due to this.