Learn more about text-to-speech functionality in InformaCast can be used to send mass notification and emergency communication in your organization.
Transcript
INTERVIEWER: We’re talking to Ken Bywaters, Executive Vice President of Product Management. Ken, can you talk to us about text to speech, and how that works in connection with informed guests?
KEN BYWATERS: Certainly. So text to speech is a pretty familiar concept for most people, I think. Well the way our approach to text to speech is not to bundle in the text to speech engine ourselves, because there’s lots of varieties, lots of choices out there and our consumers want to be able to choose which one they like best. So what we’ve done is allow for a hook that you can insert any text to speech engine, take the text of an InformaCast message and convert it to speech, audio, and send it out to any of your Cisco phones, or desktops, or speakers, in the form of audio. So it’s very convenient, very flexible, allows people, to make their own choice.
INTERVIEWER: So there’s an engine that will plug in that will generate this, is that how that works?
KEN: Yeah, Microsoft, for one, bundles one in with their operating system, but I’ve found that people like different ones. I’m from Texas, text to speech engines might sound a little differently from someone else in different parts of the country. So people have pretty strong feelings for which one to use, for instance. If you don’t like the one Microsoft provides for free, there’s plenty of other ones to choose from, whether they are for free or for purchase.
INTERVIEWER: And have you seen many installations of this, and what would be an example of how someone’s using this?
KEN: Well I’ve seen people start to use it in transportation, in particular, where you know, they, they want to announce the arrival of a train, or a gate change, or something like that. The message is extremely predictable, that they’re not going to have to record live, but, the people seeing or getting the message aren’t going to be near a display. So what they do is they’ll take that, convert it to text to speech and pump it out the loud speakers. That way the person sending the message doesn’t have to do much to create the message and it just goes out and then they send it. Another nice thing is you can customize any message, any InformaCast message right before it goes out. You can put up the framework of what you’re going to say in text, maybe write a paragraph of what you’re going to say, but then you change it a little bit to give it specifics to the message. Uh you know, ‘now boarding rows thirty-one and higher’. You might type in ‘now boarding rows blank’, and then type in ‘thirty-one or higher’ yourself, and then the text to speech engine takes it and sends it out, from there. Those are the, the most common uses I’ve seen of it, so far.
INTERVIEWER: Is it difficult to implement this with InformaCast?
KEN: No, it’s actually quite easy. It’s documented in our installation guide, and really, it’s no different than sending any other message out. There’s only one part of the message where you just attach a script, which is a text to speech script, and it sends the text to the message and it’ll automatically be converted before it’s sent out.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, and if your organization is interested in this, and they have InformaCast currently, what’s the version that they would need to run this?
KEN: 6.1 was the first version to have this, but then that, that came out in 2009, so it’s, it’s been out for awhile.
INTERVIEWER: OK. Well very good Ken, thank you for your time today.
KEN: Thank you.
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