The TorranceLearning Download is coming up on Friday, November 16, 2012! If you haven’t attended The Download before, here’s what it’s all about: We run several really short, concurrent discussions on a wide range of topics, all related to learning and development. You choose what you want to see, wander about as you wish. Did you notice that?  They’re called "discussions" not "sessions" — and that’s on purpose. While the person facilitating certainly has something to share, the Q&A goes in all directions. Many of the sessions don’t even use PowerPoint or demos (egad!). Got something to share?  We still have a few spots open for discussions, and we’d love to hear about your approach, your ideas, even your book. But … you don’t even have to be the expert to facilitate a session. Bring some ideas, bring some questions, and get ready for a lively discussion. (Honestly, it’s just as much fun and people really do learn from a peer-to-peer discussion.) We ask everyone who joins us for a Download to come with the same spirit of giving and paying it forward. We’re excited to see you there!

I was asked about approaches for eLearning for Sales People.  I’ve had quite a bit of experience with this and actually one of my very first projects was creating a pretty incredible eLearning solutions for Lexus sales people.  Of course, it’s such a big topic that I decided to cheat and quickly point the person to eLearning Learning and particular to eLearning Sales, eLearning Sales Metrics, Sales eLearning Case Studies, and Sales Performance Support. Instructional and Performance Strategies for Sales eLearning Learning Theory 101 for Sales and Marketing Professionals (Part 1)- Business Casual, October 13, 2008 When consulting with sales and marketing professionals who work for companies that create training products and programs, I try not to be a "training purist" when discussion goes to "positioning" their product for the market. Specifically, the web. In Part 2, I'll list some of the levels within one of the learning types. Learning Theory 101 for Sales and Marketing Professionals (Part 2)- Business Casual, October 18, 2008 Learning Theory 101 For Sales and Marketing Professionals (Part 3-Last)- Business Casual, October 24, 2008 eLearning Development: Instructional Design Lessons from a Sales Trainer- Upside Learning Blog, July 11, 2009 That’s because I’ve been in training this week; and would you believe it was Retail Sales training. What’s an instructional designer doing attending sales training? We’ve been tasked with converting their Retail Sales Training seminar into an eLearning package. Yes, I know haven’t posted anything interesting last few days. Data Driven- eLearning Technology, December 10, 2008 Will the retail sales training change behavior in ways that improve customer satisfaction? Understanding this model is important in order to be able to apply it within different situations in order to help drive behavior change that ultimately leads to improvement in metrics. Most action plans last four to six weeks. A Formula for Storytelling in eLearning- Integrated Learnings, April 6, 2010 When a client asked our team to develop a sales skills enhancement course, we opted to base the training on the methods of the most successful sales person in the department. By Shelley A. Gable. One of the things I love about instructional design is that it engages me both analytically and creatively. Illustrate a concept. Learning Performance Business Talent Focus- eLearning Technology, July 15, 2009 Performance - Responsible for ensuring that behavior change occurs in a way that improves performance. All things being equal (which they never are), I'm guessing my focus is more a business and performance focus. Certainly Work Literacy has a learning and performance focus and is a passion of mine. Does this ring true? Work Context: The New Classroom- Living in Learning, March 22, 2010 Fifteen of those years were spent living out of a suitcase as a roving sale trainer and then as a manager. It was shocking to me because I had convinced myself - after more frequent flyer miles and Marriott points than a human could use - that I had the sales training gig figured out. And I did. As oddly as it may sound.I Harvesting Learning’s Fruit: A Downstream Training Investment- Living in Learning, September 4, 2009 Learners, managers, training staff, and SMEs all have a vested interest in what happens after training with respect to reinforcing learning through coaching, knowledge sharing, and in the case of sales people - boasting and bragging. Yes, I was in sales for many years and know what to expect. Refer to Figure 3.0 Figure 3.0. The Business Case for Social Learning- Daretoshare, April 13, 2009 Job losses, combined with cutbacks in workforce development investments, mean that many companies are less able to serve customers, make sales or generate innovations than they were just a few months ago. The Business Case for Social Learning. In effect, their capabilities are in recession. Creating scenarios for learning - a four-step guide- Bottom-Line Performance, May 27, 2009 If you are creating a sales training course, for example, your challenge might be the need to increase sales in a territory. The first course was designed to teach new sales reps basic electrical terminology. Tom Kuhler and his "Rapid e-learning&# blog once again bats 1000 by sharing tips for creating e-learning scenarios. Technical Approaches and Case Studies for Sales eLearning Sales Team Portal for Content and Expert Access- eLearning Technology, October 12, 2009 I wanted to share some discussions I've recently had around an interesting project where the company provided the sales team a collaboration, content distribution and expert access portal. Their large sales team sells a diverse and complex set of products and services to multiple markets. Do you have a case study for me? learning. Shift in eLearning from Pure Courseware towards Reference Hybrids- eLearning Technology, May 25, 2006 sales. Most of the content is presented as static web pages that tell how to perform particular tasks, but some of the pages contain embedded Captivate movies to demonstrate or simulate use of the system. Just when you've made the transition from the prior generation of CBT authoring tools (e.g., It is asynchronous. Using the iPad in Sales Training: Case Study by Lora Davis- Learning Solutions Magazine, July 19, 2010 instruction, one sales training team has already been successful in using Apple’s new device in blended. While many e-Learning producers are struggling to understand how the iPad may be useful in online. instruction in the classroom. Here’s their story. Case studies of corporate (social) learning- March 12, 2010 The Business Case for Social Learning , Accenture, Point of View, April 2009 Sun Learning eXchange " When the company�s sales division reduced training hours and budget, Sun Learning Services (SLS) needed to get strategic. Here are some examples of social learning in organisations. Im looking for the Why? and How?] 10 Strategies for Integrating Learning and Work (part 1)- Gram Consulting, June 15, 2009 The goal of learning in the workplace is performance-individual and organizational.  If we’ve learned nothing else in recent years, we’ve learned that improving performance through learning is more effective the more it is integrated with real work.  Build a performance support system. Understand the job. The Future of the Training Department- Learning and Working on the Web, October 21, 2009 NCR delivered the first sales training. You’re going to shift the focus to creativity, innovation, and helping people perform better, faster, cheaper. Tags: Informal Learning Performance Improvement The latter 20th Century was the golden era of the training department. People had vocations, not jobs. The U.S. ASTD is born. Bridging the Performance Gap: Training is Just Part of the Solution- Performance Punctuated, July 1, 2010 If, on the other hand, you are changing your sales model, a pretty important and difficult change, you need a change management strategy and plan. Therefore, there always has to be some reinforcement and feedback to truly affect performance. Tags: Performance Improvement Talent Management Organizational Learning by Reni Gorman. Social Learning at Sun- Learning in a Sandbox, June 5, 2009 As a result of that they couldn’t provide the training hours needed to meet the training needs of the sales people. Secondly, sales people needed to have access to the right tools and information needed to close their deals in the field. informal learning??). A Pharmaceutical Leveraging Web 2.0 --In a Big Way- Kapp Notes, November 17, 2008 site containing information on mechanisms of action, employee and project profiles and Pfizer products and other information useful to researchers and sales personnel within Pfizer. If you think Web 2.0 can't be used in your company because of legal or regulatory concerns, think about this. Pfizerpedia is resource-sharing Web 2.0 tags: web_2.0 Sun Microsystems Uses Open Source and Enterprise Social Software to Build YouTube-Like Portal for Social Learning- Learning on the Leading Edge, March 19, 2009 eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Want to see the cast of the new Paul Feig 'Ghostbusters' movie in full costume? Here you go! The post The Women of SNL Are Officially Here To Bust Some Ghosts appeared first on WIRED.

We tried something new at our semi-annual Download conference  in November, and it was quite a hit. We called them Flash Projects (think of this as the conference version of a flash mob, not HTML5’s nemesis) and it offered a way of working together and creating something for others within the confines of a conference setting.  It turned out to be fun and productive, and gave teams a chance to get to know each other in a way they wouldn’t have during a regular discussion session. Here’s what we did. During each concurrent session time slot, we offered a Flash Project topic. We chose topics where some best practices exist, where the core problems around them haven’t been solved, and where there are multiple right answers. Our topics for this Download were: Learning Evaluation, Aligning with Core Values, Onboarding New Hires and "Pimp My LMS." You’ll notice that those topics are awfully broadly defined. That’s on purpose. Once they arrived in the room, each project team received three discussion questions for their topic to suggest different ways in which the team could pursue the topic. (We had a little fun with this, delivering the questions in a Mission Impossible themed envelope, then leaving the room.) Each team had just one flip chart page, and some markers - and no designated official facilitator. The directions were intentionally short — enough to keep the team on track, without stifling creativity. With 30 minutes to work, and an empty room to work in, the teams had a lot to accomplish. And accomplish they did. As can be expected, each team worked differently. One team even drew a tree as an organizing theme for their response. Complete strangers came together and pooled their knowledge. At the end of 30 minutes, they hung their poster in the main conference room for all to see, and they presented their results at the end of the Download to the entire conference. Steve Gill even blogged about his Flash Project experience here. In upcoming blog posts, we’ll share what the teams came up with. For now, here’s what we learned about this type of exercise: Choose topics that are interesting & meaty topics. Interesting topics will draw people to the session. (10% of the Download attendees participated in a Flash Project.) Meaty topics still have unanswered questions worth working on. Keep the directions sparse. Provide only as much guidance as you need to keep the groups on track, without bogging them down with a lot of rules. It’s likely they’ll break them anyway, or waste time debating them. Keep the sessions short. Half an hour seemed to be plenty of time, particularly because we didn’t expect anyone to come with material prepared. A short time period is easy to risk on a new experience. Don’t do too many of them. It’s an interesting way to engage and learn, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing. Let the group self-manage. You don’t have to assign a leader for the group. The type of person who chooses a session like this is likely to be someone willing to step up and participate, if not take charge. Our groups tended to self-correct when they got off topic, and the uncomfortable periods in the beginning when no one knew how to dive in were very short. Keep the reporting out time short. Groups should report out their best results, not all the discussion it took to get there. This was an experiment for us, and it worked out really well. We’ll continue to have Flash Projects at the Download - join in even if you’re just interested in the experience of it.  

With Art Santa Fe this weekend, check out a handy guide to a jewel of the Southwest. The post Santa Fe: Land of Burritos and George R. R. Martin appeared first on WIRED.

At our November Download conference  we asked the roughly 60 learning & development professionals who joined us about their challenges at work, their plans for the coming year, and their feelings on the job. Despite the grey fall weather in November, the slow economic recovery in Michigan, and the looming deadline to avoid the fiscal cliff (because no article these days is complete without a reference to the US politico-economic situation), learning & development professionals turn out to be a pretty cheerful group. When asked about their feelings over the last month at work, twice as many people in the learning business responded "Energized!" as "Overwhelmed!" A relatively small handful replied "Frustrated" and only one admitted to being "Bored."   Now, this was an energized group to begin with. The event itself was upbeat, required a lot of physical movement, offered good food, and encouraged a lot of conversation. We laughed, talked, met new people, saw old friends and basically had all the elements of a good party, minus the rock band. Our question specifically asked about the previous month, though, so the feel-good atmosphere of the Download event shouldn’t play too much in the results. That got us to thinking about 3 characteristics of energized people at work: They bring their own personal energy. Life is what you make of it. Your temperament, personal habits and how you cope with stress all contribute to your personal energy at work and throughout your life. Perhaps learning professionals happen to be a particularly well-rested, well-hydrated, fit, mildly caffeinated bunch. Or perhaps people like that self-select to come to our events. Either way, I’m sure glad to be surrounded by people with that kind of positive personal energy. They work for organizations with enlightened cultures. It’s probably not a big leap of logic to find energized people thriving at organizations with positive work cultures. Here at TorranceLearning, we’re raving fans of the Small Giants Community. The Small Giants Community is full of "companies who define success by not only their bottom line, but by their contributions to their community, dedication to great customer service and the creation and preservation of workplace cultures of excellence," and we happen to think that’s pretty energizing. At least it’s working for us. They are doing work that excites them. The most joyful times in life are when we’re doing things that make us happy. For example, this week we were doing some learning design work with a client. We’re coming up with a completely new solution - we’re breaking new ground. It’s a super fit for the client’s situation and I don’t think anyone else is doing it this way yet. I can’t wait to share the resulting model with the world. And I am completely energized. Of course, the group of people we asked is nothing at all like a random sample. Our Download conference attracts a mixture of corporate and higher-ed folks focused on on-the-job training for adults. It may be that their organizations value learning and professional development enough to allow them to carve out 4 ½ hours on a Friday afternoon for a fun, informal and fast-paced learning exchange. And I’m glad they did.   Megan Torrance is founder and CEO of TorranceLearning, which designs and develops custom technology-based learning solutions, and a Trustee at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum. Follow Megan and TorranceLearning on Facebook or Linked In.

This is fourth post in a series on Text-to-Speech (TTS) for eLearning written by Dr. Joel Harband and edited by me (which turns out to be a great way to learn).  The other posts are: Text-to-Speech Overview and NLP Quality, Digital Signal Processor and Text-to-Speech, and Using Text-to-Speech in an eLearning Course.   If this topic is of interest, then also check out the Big Question this month: Voice Over in eLearning. In this post we’ll discuss some really useful stuff, text-to-speech tools that are integrated with an authoring solution.  These products promise to automate the process of adding audio to eLearning thereby streamlining and accelerating the production of eLearning courses. We’ll look at: Adobe Captivate 4, 5 (with TTS narration feature) Tuval Software Industries Speech-Over Professional (for PowerPoint) Requirements for a TTS Product First, let's set down the requirements that eLearning professionals would expect from a production TTS tool and see how these two products fulfill them. The first requirement is obvious: TTS voices with audio distribution license, which are of acceptable quality for eLearning applications, should be provided. As we mentioned in the first post, the TTS voice is a major advance in audio technology but it needs a host of minor innovations to make it usable and efficient, which lead to the further requirements: TTS operations should be integrated with an authoring tool so that it is easy to add voice content to a visual presentation and have it spoken when individual slides are displayed, or spoken in synch with screen object animations such as successive bullets appearing. Sound file operations should be transparent to the user. Subtitles should be automatically created from the input text, formatted and coordinated with the speaking voice. Subtitles are important both for accessibility requirements and to enhance understanding of the voice content. Easy to update and change the voice content and subtitles to keep presentations up-to-date. This is important for retaining the value of the presentation. Easy to modulate the voice. Voice modulation adds clarity and realism by introducing silent delays, word emphasis and speed and pitch changes that can make a monotonous voice come alive. Voice modulation is achieved by introducing modulation instructions (tags) into the text flow. The tool must make this very easy and intuitive. We'll discuss this point in the next post. Support for correctly pronouncing highly technical words or company slogans or expressions. Background music. Adding suitable background music can support and enliven the TTS voices. Let's look at how the tools stand up to requirements 2-4. Captivate Captivate 4 introduced a TTS feature for adding slide narration and had NeoSpeech’s Paul and Kate voices built-in. Captivate 5 added several Loquendo voices as well as access to any voices that are installed on the computer. Adding voice content Captivate lets you enter narration text for TTS voices through its slide notes pane. Each line of notes is entered and stored separately. Any note line can be associated with a TTS voice and a narration sound file generated from it. Multiple note lines on the slide can be associated with different TTS voices and the narration sound files generated will play in sequence when the slide is displayed. In case you need to coordinate the voice sound with screen animation, a time-line editor is provided. Subtitles Captivate lets you create and display subtitles (closed captions) from the same notes text lines you used for the TTS narration. You need to manually synch the duration of the subtitles display with the voice sound. Long subtitles would need to be broken up manually and entered as separate note lines. Changing voice content To make changes in the voice content, change the notes text lines and regenerate the sound files. If the sound length changes, you will need to re-synch the voice, the subtitles, and the screen animation. Example The screen shot below shows a Captivate slide with three lines of note text. Each line has been used to produce narration using TTS and to produce a closed caption subtitle (1st and 2nd check boxes respectively), that is, three separate sound files play with subtitles as this slide is displayed. The lower text animation box is the screen title that appears in synch with the second sound file. The timing was determined by the time-line editor and set manually. The screen shot below shows the Speech Management panel. It shows how each note line can be associated with a different voice to produce a separate sound file. The screen shot below shows the Closed Captioning panel, which lets you use time-line editing to synch the duration of the closed captions (subtitles) with the speaking voices, as indicated. This time-line editor was also used to determine the start time, 8.6 secs, for the screen title animation. In summary, it is possible to use Captivate to achieve a combination of multiple screen animations, TTS sounds, and subtitles on a slide, with a process of manual synchronization using time-line editing. Speech-Over Professional Tuval Software's Speech-Over Professional 4 works with Microsoft PowerPoint as an add-in. PowerPoint is the most popular tool for producing e-learning presentations, either by itself or together with other e-learning tools. Speech-Over comes bundled with NeoSpeech Paul and Acapela Heather or with NeoSpeech Paul and Kate and will recognize any voice installed on the computer. Speech-Over is well-integrated with PowerPoint and creates, combines and synchronizes voice media effects, subtitle effects and screen object animation effects by working directly with PowerPoint APIs. Synchronization is automatic; time-line editing is not required. Adding voice content The narration text for the TTS voices is input directly through a dialog box within PowerPoint. The text can be spoken when individual slides are displayed or spoken in synch with screen object animations like successive bullets. Speech-Over adds the screen object animations, if none have been defined. TTS voices are selected by a pre-defined voice scheme so there is no need to choose the TTS voice for each text input. Speech-Over creates slide notes from the TTS text. Subtitles Speech-Over automatically produces subtitle effects from the input text, formats and synchronizes them with the speaking voice. Long subtitles are automatically broken up and displayed in succession. Changing voice content The text content is edited through the same type of dialog by which it was entered. Alternatively, you can edit all text on a slide on a single dialog. The sound media effect, subtitle effect and animation effect are all regenerated and automatically synchronized without any need for time-line editing. You can also re-order narration clips and copy and paste them between screen objects. Example Let’s see how the same example is done using Speech-Over without any time-line synchronization. The screen show below shows how the first text line is entered in the dialog. The screen background was selected previously so that a "slide" narration clip is created which will play when the slide is displayed. The Acapela Heather voice is used. The third text line is entered in the same way. The screen shot below shows how the second text line is entered in the dialog. This time the screen title was selected previously so that the sound file will automatically play when the screen title animates, - where the title animation effect is added by Speech-Over. The Paul voice is used for this text. The screen shot below shows some useful Speech-Over dialogs: the Slide Clip Content Editor, which lets you edit the text content of all narration clips on the slide, and the Clip Organizer, which displays narration clips as rows. The row order is the clip playing order, which can be easily changed by the up/down arrows. All changes are automatically re-synched. In summary, it is possible to use Speech-Over to achieve a combination of multiple screen animations, TTS sounds, and subtitles on a slide, with automatic synchronization. Summary Both Captivate and Speech-Over fulfill the requirements 2-4. For the examples given, Speech-Over is more efficient, especially for updates and maintenance, because it synchronizes voices, subtitles and screen object animations without time-line editing and automatically subdivides subtitles. For the simple case of one text line for a static slide, where no synchronization or subtitle division is required, the two tools would be similarly effective for these requirements. In the next post we'll discuss the requirements of voice modulation and pronunciation for these products. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.

Hall H got a special treat in today's Walking Dead panel, and here it is. The post The Walking Dead Season 6 Trailer Is Live From Comic-Con appeared first on WIRED.

At our November Download, we asked about everyone’s plans for 2013. In short: more of everything! Let’s take a deeper look at the results of our completely non-scientific sample. More mobile learning.  More than half the respondents will be doing more mobile learning in 2013. Combine all the buzz these days about mobile with the fact that less than 2% of all formal learning hours are available via mobile technologies (according to the ASTD State of the Industry report), and this seems right on track.  We’ve been asking our clients for years if they see a need for mobile access to the learning we’re developing with them. Big and small clients alike, most didn’t have the imperative to do so. In 2012, a small handful took the plunge into mobile. It’s only January 2013, and we’re already having conversations about mobile learning with two clients. Mobile is here to stay, at least among our group. No one reports that they plan to be doing less mobile learning in 2013. Those organizations that are doing something in this space don’t plan to turn back. To the organizations that don’t have any plans for mobile learning in 2013, we say, "Don’t despair!" Followed by a strong, "Don’t do it if you don’t have the business case for it!" For all the hype being made by those out in front of the curve, mobile is still in its infancy. Watch and learn, and you’ll be far more prepared when your time comes.  We’re working on ways for our clients to take simple, inexpensive baby steps into mobile learning - stay tuned for more on that. More online social learning. Almost everyone in our group is planning to do more or the same amount of online social learning in 2013. If you’re looking for a trend to follow, online social learning is a good one: there are existing, open platforms out there (think Facebook and LinkedIn) that don’t cost any hard dollars to get started. Your intranet probably comes with built-in discussion boards you can leverage for learning. If the experiment bombs, at least it wasn’t an expensive one. Note that we asked about online social learning. We also find in our work that the "regular" kind of social learning in the tangible world — learning from your peers, coaching, mentoring, buddy systems, networking, conferences, action learning teams and the like - is still alive and well. More elearning. From the looks of things, elearning isn’t going to be losing any ground to mobile or social learning in 2013. All but two of the organizations in our sample are planning on doing more or the same amount of self-paced elearning this year. It’ll be really interesting to see how this matches up with ASTD’s figures for 2012 and 2013 when they come out, since the State of the Industry report  showed a net decline in self-paced elearning from 2010 to 2011, despite an overall increase in technology-based learning. (They included instructor-led online, remote satellite-based ILT, DVDs and CD-ROMs, mobile learning and audio CDs in their technology-based learning figure.) And with respect to elearning and learning budgets in general, it’d be foolish to separate our results from the general economic recovery, slow as it may be. The last few years of belt-tightening and risk-averse decision-making have certainly had their impact on higher ticket items like elearning in smaller and mid-sized organizations. Larger organizations, perhaps, see an obvious and quick return on elearning given the number of learners they can reach with a single effort. More instructor-led training. ILT is here to stay. Remember the hype 20 years ago? Elearning (back then we called it computer-based training) would mean the end of ILT. Wrong! Trainers are using more remote and online technologies, but even good old instructor-led classroom training accounts for nearly 60% of all formal learning hours delivered in ASTD’s report. Among our group, everyone will be doing some ILT in 2013, although a very small group will be doing less of it than last year. More webinars. Airfares are headed (slightly) higher in 2013. Corporate travel is expected to decline. If you’re doing more ILT in a distributed organization, then it means you’re probably hosting more live training online. We like to distinguish between live web-based training with opportunities for interactivity and exploration from those horrid 55 minute slide shows with 5 minutes of Q&A at the end (that is, if you haven’t Alt+Tab-bed away to something more interesting like watching paint dry).  The Elearning Guild even offers two-day online conferences with multiple concurrent sessions and no name-tag-on-a-lanyard necessary. That’s an awful lot of "more." More mobile, more social, more elearning, more ILT, more webinars. We’ve already established that this group is a pretty optimistic bunch, and our Download is an uplifting kind of experience. Is this just a lot of wishful thinking on their part? We don’t think so. Combine an economic recovery with increased expectations of employees for performance … and we think we’ll see an increased investment in developing and transforming the workforce in 2013. Onward and upward!

Some challenging questions are being raised in this month’s Big Question - Voice Over in eLearning.  Some of the key questions: Given the range of solutions for voice-over from text-to-speech, home-grown human voice-over, professional voice-over: how do you decide what's right for your course? How do you justify the budget and how does that factor into your choice of solution? Are there places where text-to-speech makes sense? This post is part of the series on Text-to-Speech (TTS) for eLearning written by Dr. Joel Harband and edited by me.  The other posts are: Text-to-Speech Overview and NLP Quality, Digital Signal Processor and Text-to-Speech, Using Text-to-Speech in an eLearning Course, and Text-to-Speech eLearning Tools - Integrated Products.   We attacked these questions a little differently than the big question.  We particularly focused on: Why use Text to Speech (TTS)? Why not use human voice-over? Or just use text on the screen? How will the quality of the voice affect the quality of the learning? How will the students accept the voices? To best answer these questions, we asked professionals who have had actual experience in the field: people that have produced eLearning courses with text to speech tools (Speech-Over Professional) and have received feedback from learners. You can think of this as four case studies of Text-to-Speech.  The case studies come from: Case Study A. Company-wide training modules by an IT Process & Quality Manager at a Large Global Communications Corporation.  Case Study B. Global web training by a Systems Engineering Manager at a Large Product Corporation. Case Study C. Company-wide training modules by a Lead Courseware Developer at a Security Products Corporation. Case Study D. Support for live presentations by a Process Design Consultant. Why Use Text-to-Speech? There were a range of answers to the question: A. Our company has a prior background in TTS - our phones use TTS - and we've tried TTS before for training. This time it is succeeding because of the price, the voice quality, and the integration with PPT. I think it will only get better with time. The reasons we use TTS are three fold: * E-learning with voice-over is a preferred training approach within our company. This allows for people to take their training at their own pace; when and where they want to take it. Voice over is very helpful for our associates that English is not their first language. * Using human voices makes it more difficult to create and maintain the training. Only a few people have the quality voice with minimal accent to perform the recordings. This creates a resource constraint for the creation and maintenance of e-learning material. Usually, the e-learning was out-of-date with the subject of the training and quickly became obsolete.* Voice over, especially computer voice, has proven to be helpful to associates that English is not their first language. The computerized voice is more consistent in pronunciation and speaks at a more steady pace. Thus, allowing people to understand the material more easily. B. It offers a significant advantage over other methods of providing audio with PowerPoint. C. We were looking for something that provided us with a short production and turn-around time, that our small development team could do in-house. Something easy to edit and change on the fly, without having to send it out, or schedule lengthy voiceover work. These responses echo what we generally expect, Text-to-Speech offers a solution that is much faster to produce and 100x faster to modify as changes occur.  This means a faster time-to-market and lower cost than human narration.  There are obviously ways to keep human voice-over costs down by using in-house talent, but it still takes significantly more time.  And it’s especially true when changes occur. If you think about a simple spectrum of solutions: Text on Screen No Voice-Over Text-to-Speech Narration Human Narration In-House Human Narration Professional Lowest Cost Fastest     Highest Cost Slowest Certainly there’s a balance to be found.  We’ll consider other factors below. I thought the response from Case Study D was particularly interesting: D. Initially, I experimented with TTS as a way to add content to a presentation that I as a presenter could use to refresh myself before presenting. I found that the act of adding TTS made me aware of a number of design issues with the presentation. Then I thought: wouldn't this be great as a way for participants to refresh their knowledge after the training. One of the recommendations around the use of Text-to-Speech is that it’s used as part of any course that eventually will be recorded by Humans to prepare the script as part of authoring.  That way, you have a good idea what it will sound like once it’s recorded.  In this case, they were using Text-to-Speech to prepare themselves for a presentation.  But instead of recording themselves against the slides, they used TTS.  They could easily listen to their script.  That’s actually a fantastic idea.  And it led this person to eventually use the TTS as the basis of creating courses that could be used after the training sessions. Why didn't you use human voice-over? Obviously, cost and time are a major factor here.  But a lot of the specific reasons have more to do with a hassle factor of using voice talent.  Here were the responses: A. Mainly for updating where I don't have to look for the original voice talent who can now charge more. We don't have voice talent available internally. B. Publishing a straight recording keeps all of the errors of the subject matter expert, speaking too fast, low sound quality, running on or off topic. Maintaining the recorded voice requires an entire rerecording and production where TTS is much simpler. C. For our first project, we did use human voice-over as well as text. We found that the added production time, and having to schedule around voice over, plus re-doing entire segments for one small correction, to get the sound to match, was prohibitive both cost and time-wise. D. I don't have a particularly great voice for adding to the slide so that's a factor. But the other factor is that it's 100 times easier to change text than re-record speech. Even if I were to record speech I would first do a TTS and then only after I believed it to be final, might I record. Anyone who has used in-house or professional talent knows about the hassle factor of getting things done.  You often find yourself not doing retakes when something is wrong or there are changes just because it’s too much work.  Even when you do your own voice-over, there’s still more time involved.  So adding to the spectrum above: Text on Screen No Voice-Over Text-to-Speech Narration Human Narration In-House Human Narration Professional Lowest Cost Fastest Easy to Change Lowest Hassle     Highest Cost Slowest Hard to Change Biggest Hassle Why didn’t you just use Text on Screen? I think some of the other responses to the Big Question address this much better - why use voice-over at all?  But a couple of the reasons from these case studies have to do with providing support to ESL learners: B. We asked our students which helps them learn; subtitles only or subtitles with speech. They agreed that subtitles with speech are better. English as second language students even said it helped them learn English. C. Since our training modules are used world-wide, in English, we wanted voice as well as text (all our training modules have both). Many foreign students have much better vocal/listening comprehension vs. just reading comprehension, if English is not their first language, so having voice as well as text was important to us. I would highly recommend looking at some of the specific answers to Voice Over in eLearning that talk to issues of when to use voice-over in eLearning.  For example: Learning environment - some environments audio is not good.  In other cases, it’s great to have audio to add engagement. To support graphics or animations on screen - large amounts of text would be distracting. I will caution you that some of the responses suggest that Voice-Over roughly equates to slower learning with no improved effect; and limits your cultural appeal. There’s also some suggestion that the script should be available with a mute button to be read by learners who prefer that modality.  I would claim this would definitely argue for Text-to-Speech. Others argue that to capture emotion and to engage, voice-over is very important. So, my spectrum table becomes woefully inadequate to capture all of this. Anyone want to take a shot? Concerns About Quality? In each case, there was concern about quality, but the result was good enough, especially with caveats to be used.  I think the responses speak (pardon the pun) for themselves. A. For many English speaking associates, the computerized voice can be very boring and mundane. When we researched TTS about 5 years ago the higher quality voices were too expensive. Today, those same voices are much less expensive and have broken that barrier of being too "computerish". Training the voices is an important issue. The support provided by Speech-Over for modulation and pronunciation is good. B. We were concerned that it would be too mechanized sounding. It turned out not to be and was well accepted by students. C. Yes, we were concerned that the slight robotic cadence might detract from the training, just because it does not come out completely natural all the time. The Paul voice is very good, but still recognizable as mechanical. To counter this, we put a statement up front in our training introduction about the narration being computer generated, so an awareness and expectation of this is set with the students before they even begin the training. With this disclaimer in place, we have had no complaints at all about the "voice" in the presentations, and our technical training modules using this TTS have been successfully taken by hundreds of students world-wide as part of their technical service training with us. As we worked with the TTS, we quickly developed a style of writing the scripts that really worked well with TTS, and minimizes the difference between using a computer generated voice, vs. human voice-over. In fact, we received complaints about our first human voice-over training for a few pronunciation gaffs, and some pacing issues, where we have received none at all on our subsequent TTS developed training modules. D. The voice quality is extremely important. As soon as people hear what sounds like a robot voice they tend to immediately believe the presentation to be cheap like the voice. So voice quality is the key. The current voices although very good are more monotonous than a human voice. I know that there are some tools for changing Paul's voice, for example, but I haven't tried them. Results?  Acceptance by Students? Again, the responses are somewhat self-evident: A. Yes. The TTS technology coupled with the software allowed us to create e-learning material in about half the time as human voice over. The maintenance of the e-learning material takes 75% less time than maintaining material with human voice over. This allows us to create and maintain material much faster with less resources and without needing specialized resources that have voices specialized for recording. We have produced courses for 6000 people in the company and we are getting good feedback: 80% are satisfied, 10% love it and 10% feel offended. My conclusion is that the voices are "good enough" for training applications. B. Yes. It actually helped us reduce the length of training by having the subject matter experts edit their transcripts and eliminate extra unnecessary speech. C. Yes and more. The ease of converting the text to voice, coupled with the ability to go back and instantly change / edit / correct narration on a single slide, and have it exactly match the voice, volume, timber, etc. of every other slide, recorded days or weeks or months earlier is invaluable. Short technical/repair training modules that took us a month or more to develop and schedule voice-over and re-voice-over to correct and edit, now literally take us just days to develop start to finish, right on the desktop. Acceptance by the students has been 100%. All the students taking our TTS based training are required to pass a Certification test after they complete those training modules. Our first-time pass rates are identical for our earlier human voice-over training, vs. our current TTS based training - so if outcomes are the measure, for us, there is no difference between the two as far as their functional performance, and the Return On Investment is much higher for us with the TTS. In surveying students who completed our TTS based training, they all said the same thing, that at first it was a bit different, being computer generated narration, but after they were into the training their ear became tuned to the voice, and it really wasn't any different than listening to someone talk who had a particular regional or foreign accent to their speech. The comment about learners getting used to the voice is interesting.  I think putting a caveat up front and then learners getting used to the voice is an important take-away. Summary Obviously, there are complex questions around the use of voice-over at all.  These are hard to capture in the simple kind of spectrum table that I attempted above.  Some specific things that jump out at me: The TTS voice quality was acceptable for eLearning applications and did not detract from learning effectiveness. High Emotion - Clearly if you have sensitive material with high emotion, likely using actual voices (key executives or employees) might be best.  Professional talent can also help with this.  Text-to-speech accelerates development time vs. human voice-over.  And maintaining the voice is possible. Much of the comparison of Text-to-speech vs. Human narration focuses on the hassle factor more than cost. Text-to-speech makes it easy to keep the material up-to-date and accurate vs human recordings that can become obsolete and would need to be re-recorded. Caveat Text-to-Speech - Put a note up front so that learners are more open to the voice. Use Text-to-Speech to prepare your scripts If you expect change, don’t use human narration I welcome your thoughts and comments. eLearning Technology Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.