Distributed Rendering Tool for Voices (DRTV) Familiar, Expressive Voices & Personalities Speech Technology & Media Solutions By Dale Schalow SCHALOW Innovations Ashburn, Virginia (USA)

DRTV Goals Professionally Design, Produce, Develop Familiar-sounding Voices from today, tomorrow and the past Provide Always-On Service to Consumers, Businesses and Government Provided for Interactive and Linear Media Users as a Hosted Solution (Client/Server)

Description High-quality voices for use in Internet and Content. Managing Assets with New and Historic Sources.

Description High-quality voices for use in Internet and Content. –Entertainment and Education 3D animation, gaming Film, TV, radio –Accessibility Seniors Low Vision Motor-Impaired

Description Build and Manage Speech Assets: –Establish formal voice asset collection, storage and distribution –Facilitate asset preservation and restoration –Coordinate with Museums, Libraries, 3D Game/Film Studios, Radio, Foundations, Colleges, etc

Description Build and Manage Assets: –Refactor inventory for both audio and audio- visual physical assets (tapes, digital, reels, master sound recordings) –Maintain digital asset libraries –Maintain product voice library with dictionary of terms (paired vocabulary) –Coordinate asset management IS/IT needs and initiatives with customer or partnering group

Technology New media technology used –NLP Toolkit (Natural Language Processing) –Cross-Encoding for Embedded Media (PCs, HD, AAC, MP3/Internet Radio, etc) Standards being adopted –W3C (World-Wide Web Consortium) –Java™ and VoiceXML, SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language)

Team/Resources Resources allocated to this project –Support & outside services Internal software development Internet Service Provider Pro Recording Studios 3rd party vendors (hardware/software)

Speech Tech Procedures Step 1 - New Voice as Source? –Professionally Record using N-based “tape script” Output format as PCM (e.g. Wave 1-channel 16 bit) Step 2 - Existing Voice as Source –Import audio source (PCM/16 bit quality) –“Auto-Extract” using N-based “tape script” to pull phonetic-features phonemes and transcriptions Audio scanning with automatically generated text- based grammars Retaining audio output

Speech Tech Procedures Step 3 - Apply Vocabulary –Build a default dictionary of terms to allow automatic translation –Minimum 40k words (ideally more is better) Step 4 - Process Text-to-Speech (TTS) –Take as input some text (e.g. “hello”) –Use the speech synthesis engine to generate audio with the applied vocabulary Step 5 - Use the URL/file of the generated voice from Step 4 for vertical application (Web page, game, 3D import, etc)

Speech Tech Procedures Benefits Reduces time and manual effort to re-do fundamental tasks Achieved high-quality output Moving things forward on at least two-fronts –1) Voices we already know or recognize –2) Voices and creations we are yet to discover in the process Appeals to many demographics for marketability

DRTV Contact Information For more information: SCHALOW Innovations Dale B. Schalow Phone: (703) Web: