Techwire

This is the second post in a series on Text-to-Speech for eLearning written by Dr. Joel Harband and edited by me (which turns out to be a great way to learn).  The first post, Text-to-Speech Overview and NLP Quality , introduced the text to speech voice and discussed issues of quality related to its first component – the natural language processor (NLP). In this post we’ll look at the second component of a text to speech voice: the digital signal processor (DSP) and its measures of quality. Digital Signal Processor (DSP) The digital signal processor translates the phonetic language specification of the text produced by the NLP into spoken speech. The main challenge of the DSP is to produce a voice that is both intelligible and natural.  Two methods are used: Formant Synthesis.  Formant Synthesis seeks to model the human voice by computer-generated sounds, using an acoustic model. Typically, this method produces intelligible, but not very natural, speech. These a...

My posts around the Beginning of Long Slow Death of Flash and my post from a CTO perspective that I Cannot Bet on Flash for new development stirred up quite a bit of response.  A lot of it said quite correctly that HTML5 is not there yet.  And that Flash provides things that you can’t do in HTML/JavaScript.  However, there are some pretty amazing things you can do without Flash. The bottom line is that none of the feedback I’ve received has convinced me that choosing Flash as a delivery option for a new product or project would be a good idea today, especially if I want it to play on mobile and live for 5 years. But then I received a great question via a comment: I am a Masters student enrolled in an Instructional Design course with Walden University. I am somewhat new to the field and this article intrigues me. Should I hold off on learning Flash... and focus more on learning HTML5? Or would it be best to learn both? I know a very little about Flash and made...

Inc. Magazine published an article The Best Industries for Starting a Business In 2010 .  Not sure what to make of most of the article, but they did include Exam Preparation and Tutoring as one of the top ten. Parents always want their kids to do better on tests. A large number of adults returning to school are also looking for an edge. Given the low barrier to entry, this field is competitive. But if you carve out the right niche, it could be lucrative. The industry, which includes tutoring in such fields such as special education, language, and music, grew about 7 percent last year. And it seems like there are lots of eLearning Startups that are taking aim at different aspects of the Business of Learning .  My 12 eLearning Predictions for 2009 included Increase in Consumer/Education Social Learning Solutions 2008 was an interesting year that saw a myriad of new start-ups offering content through interesting new avenues. Social learning solutions like...

As you probably know, eLearning Learning has been steadily growing and is now one of the top eLearning sites on the web.  I wanted to let you know about an exciting development for eLearning Learning that’s being announced this morning in the eLearning DevCon Keynote. Garin Hess and the team from Rapid Intake has stepped in to help me keep the site going both from an effort and financial standpoint.  I'm very happy to have Garin involved because I've known him for years and he's always done a good job of helping to build the larger eLearning community through conferences that you probably already know about: eLearning DevCon Bring Your Own Laptop Garin was really excited to support this broad community of bloggers.  We both believe that while this is a loose network, it provides an important and really valuable voice.  It's somewhat the whole reason I started eLearning Learning - many people in the world of eLearning miss the great stuff that is ...

This post is a new kind of thing for me. Dr. Joel Harband wrote most of this post and I worked with him on the focus, the content and a little bit of editing - actually I couldn't help myself and I edited this a lot. So this is really a combined effort at this point. As you know, Text-to-Speech is something that's very interesting to me and Joel knows a lot about it as CEO of Tuval Software Industries maker of Speech-Over Professional. This software adds text-to-speech voice narration to PowerPoint presentations and is used for training and eLearning at major corporations. Joel was nice enough to jump in and share his knowledge of applying text-to-speech technology to eLearning. Please let me know if this kind of things makes sense and maybe I'll do more of it. It certainly makes sense given all that's going on in my personal life. Text-to-Speech Poised for Rapid Growth in eLearning Text-to-speech (TTS) is now at the point where virtual classrooms were about ...

I was asked what the biggest traffic sites are in eLearning that were not vendor specific sites. This was from a marketer trying to reach eLearning professionals. My quick answer was that Jane Hart’s site , eLearning Learning and The eLearning Guild would be among the top. But I really didn’t/don’t know the answer. I did promise I’d do some research and post what I found. I used Compete.com . It’s definitely not accurate as it way under reports traffic for eLearning Learning. However, after reading various sources that compared different traffic estimation tools, I was convinced that it was generally a decent indicator. Thanks to Harold Jarche and Susan Lewis (via twitter) and Cathy Moore and Dennis Wilen (via Facebook) with help on this. Cathy pointed me to questions about Alexa ( Wikipedia article ). Susan pointed out that none of this accounts for RSS subscription. Of course, it also doesn’t count email subscribers or twitter. So, yes … This is only rough estima...

Based on the recent Big Question - Learning Technology 2015 – I received an interesting question: "Tony, what do you think of environments like Second Life? Do you think these have a great future in the world of learning for adults?" This is a topic I’ve talked about a few times.  Probably before you begin to read my predictions, it’s worth looking at: Second Life Learning Videos where I’ve collected a few different examples of learning in Second Life.  You might also look at Second Life and Learning and Second Life as a Learning Tool. There was a great recent article (found via  Gary Woodill ) - Where Have All the Avatars Gone?   The basic point of the article is that despite not hearing as much about Second Life and other virtual worlds, a lot is happening where you can’t see it.  A couple of points from the article: Over 2,000 global enterprises, 600 universities, 35 international governments, and several divisions of the U.S. f...