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By niclasbergstrom | July 4, 2008
I have been forced to temporarily shut down the possibility to comment the posts due to large amounts of spam. Hopefully this will be solved very soon.
Niclas
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Guest blogger: Speech syntheses – one for each purpose
By niclasbergstrom | June 2, 2008
This is a post from todays guest blogger: Daniel Erkstam, Nordic Sales Director for VoiceCorp.
The pictures shows two robots. The left one is an industrial robot from ABB that probably is used to build cars or something similar. The right one is one of the most advanced AI robots that can be found today. It is possible to converse with it and it is very human like.
Both robots serve their purpose and do it well. And it is the same with speech syntheses.
When we launched the first speaking web services back in 2001 the only available voices was very robotic ones and became kind of boring listening to on longer texts. Today we use voices made in a complete different technique and the quality become closer and closer to recorded speech.
But the thing is that the older voices is still used by a lot of people and is even preferred compared to the newer ones for some purposes. For example people with visual impairment often prefer the older voices for screen-reading software’s like Jaws. The reason is that the older voices are more consequent on how they read the text and you can get used to the odd and robotic character of the voice. The older voices also read out the text in a more detailed way. The voices we use today are a lot more human like but also more “forgiving” when it comes to spelling errors and some words from foreign languages etc. The secret behind that is many times bigger database with the phonemes.
We know that the smaller need a person have for a synthetic speech, the harder judge he/she will be. We who doesn’t have reading difficulties or visual impairment can see/read the text and compare that to the voice speaking. Then we react on every little slight error in the pronouncing by the synthesis.
We put a lot of effort to make the reading as good as possible by making a lot of customizations so that the speech syntheses pronounce the current website’s vocabulary as good as possible. Because we know that there is a strong connection between how good it sounds and how many people that will use the service.
Back to the robots again: They might both serve their purposes well. But I guess it would be an easy choice which one you would pick to serve visitors at the reception desk, right?
Topics: Guest blogger, Hi-tech, TTS | No Comments »
ReadSpeaker in the Press
By niclasbergstrom | May 28, 2008
If you have a minute, please read this great article from “Insurance & Technology” about one of our recent ReadSpeaker implementations. / Niclas
Topics: Products, web accessibility | No Comments »
SpeechMachine text-to-speech in Viral Marketing
By niclasbergstrom | May 21, 2008
A sausage says more then a thousand words.
Scan, one of the leading Swedish brands just launched a really great viral marketing campaign using VoiceCorps SpeechMachine solution. The idea for the campaign is quite cool. The campaign is for marketing Scan’s new line of spicy sausages. They wanted to add some nice interaction with the user so they added the strongest media around. Speech.
The core functionalty is that the users can send “speech-cards” to each other. They enter the text, listens if it is good and send the speech card to a friend.
The cool thing is that we used a Spanish voice but using Swedish speech rules. The result is a Spanish guy speaking Swedish. It’s brilliant! It really sounds like a guy from Spain that only lived a few years in Sweden. Enough time to learn the language but keeping a strong Spanish accent. The speech solution itself was delivered in just a couple of hours thanks to SpeechMachines ability to integrate with all the TTS engines on the market.
SpeechMachine is provided by VoiceCorp as a 100% hosted service that allows creative web developers to easily add text-to-speech functionality to their web apps without requiring any knowledge about text-to-speech technology. The communication with the customer’s web based app and the SpeechMachine is based on standard HTTP requests, and is therefore really easy to integrate in any web app.
Want to try out the app, http://www.scan.se/kryddigakorvar/
Topics: Hi-tech, Products, TTS, Viral Marketing | No Comments »
The art of Server Uptime Monitoring
By niclasbergstrom | May 5, 2008
(Or; Good morning server. And how are we feeling today?)
In a SaaS environment uptime is everything. Rule is simple. No reliability, no credibility, no business.
So, how do we know that all the different servers with all the different roles are happy and functional? How can we see when more server power, RAM or disk space is needed. Monitoring.
A few years ago I developed our own server monitor system. Nothing fancy really. It mainly checked the servers every ten minutes to measure the response time. It was a client/server architecture where we had to develop small programs, one for each server role that did the necessary tests and responded back to the monitor server. The small apps did things like connecting to the database server, initiated a TTS voice, ran a php program to ensure that the web server was responding correctly etc.
If the response was not the one the monitor expected, or if the response took longer then the set threshold, it was set to notify someone that was available 24 hours day, meaning at that time, me. A notification email along with an SMS was sent to my cell phone, and I could just interrupt whatever I was doing, find myself a computer with Internet connection and solve the problem.
However, in the long run, this was not an ideal situation. I dared to set myself as receiver on all monitor alerts thanks to the fact that our servers almost never failed. Most of them ran without any interruptions for years.
When the amount of servers grew, I had to make a decision. Should I spend some valuable management time to further develop my self made monitor system or should I grow up and finally take a look on what the marked had to offer. I choose the later. First step was to employ someone that could take care of all this. The problem building companies from scratch is that it tends to be difficult to delegate… The new guy did a market research and found out that OpManager was a pretty good system. Nice UI, good looking graphs, great alert possibilities and all that. We ran it for a couple of trial periods and were just about to purchase it for the whole environment when we got this IBM blade centre.
IBM offers their monitor system for free. IBM Director Not only could it monitor low level stuff, it could also be used to install and update software on the different servers remotely. Also, it could do something that OpManager couldn’t; monitor the Storage Area Network file cluster as well as the blade centre itself (not only the blades). However, due to some shortcomings in the graphical reports, we settled for the OpManager. Time will tell if we made the right choice. Never underestimate the power of nice graphs showing what you want to see; how the systems are doing over time.
Topics: Hi-tech, infrastructure | No Comments »
50-Plus Tips and Resources to Improve Your Site’s Speed
By niclasbergstrom | April 28, 2008
Found this really good post about improving website performance
http://www.insidecrm.com/features/webmaster-turbo-kit-042108/
Read, Learn, Execute!
Topics: infrastructure | No Comments »
Simple steps for better ranking
By niclasbergstrom | April 22, 2008
Attended the SEO session at the Web2.0Expo in San Francisco today. The Session was held by Nathan Buggia (Microsoft), Vanessa Fox (Ignition Partners). Since about 43% of the visitors of websites are referred from search result pages, this is obviously getting more and more important.
In short, a couple of good rules for HTML coding to be successful in SEO:
- <title> element - This is by far the most important tag. It should be short and sweet and unique for the page.
- <meta> data element – the ”description” meta data is by far the most important one. If you write this well (relevant and not too short) this text will be the one displayed on the Search Result page. Also it means a lot for the relevance of the search result resulting in better ranking.
- Link elements (<a>)- Always use anchor text to describe the link – it will make the “trust ranking” better resulting in better ranking in the end. So, please no more “More information, Click here” links!
- <h1>, <h2> and <h3> elements - Use these the way that they are meant to be used. Do NOT use <span class=”heading1”> etc to make the same visual experience for devices able to show CSS, use the headings to bring structure to your content.
- <img alt=”the image description”> - Use Alt text if you want the search engines to care about them.
- <script> element - Not good to create links using JavaScript for search engines (or device independence or for web accessibility). Google is currently working on a simple JavaScript parser, but it is from what I heard still in an early stage. This doesn’t mean that you can not use JavaScript to show, hide and change stuff, but you should always have a Url that, also without JavaScript enabled, actually take the user (or the crawler) to the actual content. So, use the JavaScript to do fancy stuff with a onClick, but please, do not leave the url parameter empty).
- Flash - Use SWFObject to detect if the browser has Flash support. And if not, show a HTML version instead. Remember that crawlers can’t index Flash movies.
If a page do not have a unique URL it simply doesn’t exist. Not in search engines anyway.
Bottom line is really this; If you design for accessibility you design for SEO. It goes hand in hand. Stick to the guidelines and everybody is winners.
Topics: web accessibility | No Comments »
Web2.0Expo San Francisco
By niclasbergstrom | April 22, 2008
Today I arrived in San Francisco. The whether is nice and I’m looking forward to spend the week in the Bay Area. There will be 4 days of conferencing and networking among others active in the area of innovative web development. Apart from attending the Web2.0Expo and visiting partners and customers I will try to get some time to really see the city and see what the nightlife has to offer. On Thursday I will go to the Web 2.0 Afterparty arranged by the Netvibes Team where they will launch their “Netvibes Universe”.
If you happen to be in the area and would like to have a meeting to discuss what Voice On The Web can do for you, please contact me directly at niclas@voice-corp.com.
Topics: General | No Comments »
Podcasting made simple! rSpeak VocalFruits
By admin | April 3, 2008
VoiceCorp announced today, together with VocalFruits, that they launcing the rSpeak VocalFruits Information Composing System.
It is a “Web 2.0″ web application where anyone can create a podcast from any RSS source and where content owners such as bloggers can offer their audience a speaking version of their content!
The blog posts- Bang! Right into iTunes.
rSpeak VocalFruits will basically replace AudioFeed (www.audiofeedcreator.com), a not very social, but very appreciated free web service that I created about a year and a half ago.
With the new web based podcasting service, any registred user can create a podcast from any RSS feed in no time! There are also a couple of really cool features like aggregating a number of RSS feeds into one podcast or why not create a personal podcast that you can update (adding posts to) just by emailing to your personal vocalfruits email address.
In addition to the podcast RSS feed it also creates a web browser version and a mobile version ideal for mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDA’s.
In this release there will be support for US English, French and Spanish. Support for more languages (Swedish, Dutch, German, UK English and Portuguese) will be available within a month or two from what I heard. Also it will be changed so that you do not need to be a registered user to be able to listen… Anybody should be able to listen. That is key.
Check it out at www.vocalfruits.com. Stay tuned!
Topics: Hi-tech, Innovation, Products, TTS | 2 Comments »
Meet me at Web2.0 Expo San Francisco
By admin | March 25, 2008
If you are interested in having a meeting with me for a live chat in San Francisco between the 21st and 25th of April please contact me or my office. I will be attending the Web2.0Expo conference, co-produced by the Webtech and O’Reilly Media, this year as well. More about the web2.0Expo at the conference homepage.
Last year the event was really successful. A great opportunity to network with people ranging from newbeez to gurus in the field of web 2.0.
About this web2.0 thing; I was attending the Monaco Media Forum end of last year, and there was this conference track, moderated by Dale Dougherty (who coined the expression Web2.0 in the first place), that had the title “Web3.0”. Now, what is that all about I asked myself. Obviously, most other attendees seemed to ask themselves the same thing, so the conference room was really filled up. And what was it then? Was it a new technology thing? A new Internet “behaviour” or business logic kind of thing? Well, we just have to wait and see 
Niclas
Topics: General | No Comments »
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