I’m looking forward to attending ITExpo January 20th – 22nd in Miami, Florida. The lineup of Keynote speakers for this conference is fantastic. I’ll be listening especially closely to Brian Higgins, Executive Director of Ecosystem Development for Verizon Wireless. It’s refreshing, if not surprising, to see one of the big boys at a conference all about innovation.
I have the pleasure of speaking on two panels at this event, one focusing on Cloud Communications and the other on CEBP implementations and fundamentals – two topics that are very near and dear to us at Jaduka. The Cloud Communications Summit will also draw a wide audience. Many enterprises can see the light at the end of the [...]

While investigating different methods of enabling enterprise developers with voice services, we examined the services already embedded within the enterprise and why. It was very apparent that one the most successful service providers was StrikeIron, boasting many Fortune 1000 client relationships. That’s why we are excited about our announcement of the partnership between StrikeIron and Jaduka to extend our Notification Services to the StrikeIron developer base.
Jaduka Notification Service enables text-to-speech notifications or a company branded voice recording to be delivered to any phone, inside or outside of the enterprise. Those of you familiar with the StrikeIron Web Services Catalog know they have embedded their services within Microsoft Excel via LiveData for Excel and inside NetBeans. [...]

Whereas part I and part II of this series have explored vocal inflection in English — and what makes it so hard for machines to get right — this final post in our series on vocal inflection explores tone in a radically different way.
Linguists describe Chinese, Vietnamese and a great many other southeast Asian and also west African languages as tonal. This use of “tonal” contrasts with our use of “intonation” and “inflection” in our exploration of text-to-speech. Whereas we explored the emotive and discourse meanings behind “up” (pronounced with a rising tone), “up” (pronounced with a falling tone), and “up” (pronounced with a compound falling-then-rising tone) in English, speakers of tone languages use tones [...]

In part I of this post we looked at the three most basic tones in English and we checked out the performance of the text-to-speech, or TTS, robot at AT&T Labs named “Mike”. We discovered that English does in fact have tones. And we discovered that tones are hard to get right in text-to-speech.
In this post we look at a different example of vocal inflection in English. And we see how tones interact with sentences. Listen to examples #1a and b, below.
Example #1a (falling then rising): “You downloaded the newest vèrsion, didn’t you?”
Example #1b (falling then falling again): “You downloaded the newest version, didn’t you?”
(The examples here follow the presentation of local meanings of rising [...]

Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) take many forms. Think school- and jobsite-closing messages broadcast simultaneously and automatically to many phones at once some morning when there’s bad weather and you get the idea.
When we at Jaduka collaborate with clients on a new CEBP improvement project, the question of text-to-speech, or TTS, frequently comes up. Not all CEBP improvement projects need TTS. But some can benefit from careful TTS somewhere. Our general advice is to be smart about TTS — make sure you need it and then use it sparingly. And we find that we sometimes have to go back over this point because executives tend to want TTS even when they don’t need it. Think Flash [...]