Microsoft Text-to-Speech with audio playback from Front of the Room Device

As a touch console may have no speaker on it, MDEP TTS engine supports audio playback on a front of room device with transmission of text to be converted to speech from the touchscreen console. This feature is only activated when:

• The Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android device is not an all-in-one system,
• The touchscreen console and Front of the Room device are paired and network connection is on.

This design employs client-server architecture for transmission of text data from the touch console to the front of room device via the gRPC framework. The touch console serves as the client responsible for transmitting text data for TTS to the server which is running on a front of room device. The server utilizes its Text-to-Speech engine to convert the data received from the client into speech.

MDEP supports the option to disable this design to use local speaker on the touchscreen console if such is present, or a Bluetooth/wired headset. This is achieved using a system feature flag (com.microsoft.android.feature.COLLAB_TOUCH_CONSOLE) to identify the device types and enable corresponding features. This approach allows for easy integration of new device types in the future, as additional flags can be added to adjust the system configuration accordingly.