I wanted to create a talking avatar in android, with text to speech converting capability, but haven't come across any viable tutorial or a place to start yet.
Here is some info about the Android Text To Speech Class, which can convert any text we type into the corresponding voice/ speech in different languages.
Is there a way to add a face to this and have the approximate lip movements required?
Here is a list of avatar engines, but as you can see many are super expensive. Most of these require Flash, which isn't really compatible with Android, so I don't think those one will work for you: http://aidreams.co.uk/forum/index.php?page=avatar_engines#.VhGyvLR--CQ
Update: This one seems to be in active development, and they say they are working on a web version, which I assume won't use Flash, because it is becoming out of date, so maybe it'll work for you. Right now it runs on Windows and only costs $120. It can do speech recognition and text to speech. http://www.nextos.com/
Update2: Since you're just doing this for practice maybe this will work for you. Just draw some basic graphics for the face. You can use this to help you convert text to phonemes: text to phonemes converter Then use this guide to help you convert phonemes to different lip shapes: http://animation.about.com/od/flashanimationtutorials/a/animationphonem.htm
To draw things you use a SurfaceView (https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/2d-graphics.html#on-surfaceview).
Then the methods in Canvas (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/graphics/Canvas.html) like drawArc() will help you make the shapes.