[NABS-L] Ideas for delivering remarks that must follow a script

[Shane Wegner]

Gary,

Your ideas on this are excellent and the Victor stream idea gave me a thought. At my dentist's office, the tech uses a computer to record her findings on my teeth. She Speaks her finding, the software records it, advances to the next tooth and she speaks the next finding. It's totally hands off for her.

This has a fairly easy software solution for an iOS developer. Imagine a presenter wearing an earbud or air pods in transparency mode. The speech has been preloaded into an iPhone app and the presenter starts the speech by clicking her headset. Voiceover or Apple TTS starts reading the speech in small sections. As the speech is read, the presenter speaks. Any modern device has speech recognition so can understand the words and based on the speech of the presenter is able to start speaking the next section as the presenter is coming to the end of her phrase. Software is not perfect so a click of the headset will manually advance and a double click repeats the phrase if it is lost in applause for example.

I'm sure I'm missing a lot of the detail on this but the idea is software that automatically advances a prewritten speech based on the speaker's voice. Not hard only because Apple gives us all the APIs to do it. TTS and voice recognition is all there, the app just needs to tie it together with a user interface. I would be a little surprised if this didn't already exist somewhere.

S

-----Original Message-----
From: NABS-L <nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Gary Wunder via NABS-L
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 1:24 PM
To: 'National Association of Blind Students mailing list' <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Gary Wunder <garywunder at me.com>
Subject: [NABS-L] Ideas for delivering remarks that must follow a script

Hello, Elizabeth. I think that you have touched on a most intriguing topic.
We have argued for a long time that most of us get too little Braille too late. Mostly we have suggested that people speak from notes, the advantage being that you don't need as much Braille speed and in the right case you can add spontaneity to what you're saying. But there are times when what is said has to be very scripted. So what is the Braille reader who reads so slowly that it does not sound natural do? What does the reader who reads print but has to hold it up to his or her face do in the same situation?

By no means do I have definitive answers. I know one person who gives significant speeches and simply memorizes them. He has a Braille card which prompts him with a few words from each paragraph, but there is no question that he has an ability that many of us do not have or certainly have not cultivated.

I know another person or two who use a Victor Stream with a near phone. They write in text the speech they want to deliver. Then they play with learning to listen and to speak. You have certainly seen this done when translators at the United Nations do what they do. Very often when I transcribe, I do this very thing, and when I am lucky, I can insert the correct punctuation on the fly. But often I am not lucky, so it often takes a second look. I have never tried the technique of taking a text document and seeing if I can speak from it and have the result be anything like spontaneous or acceptable as a speech. What will be crucial, of course, is that you have a device that will allow for an immediate stop and an immediate restart. The second thing that I am quite sure will be required is repeated practice. You will certainly not want your words to come out with the same intonation given by the synthesizer. In addition to that, you really won't want them to come out sounding as though you have read them. Some politicians are able to speak from a transcript through a Teleprompter, and what they say does not sound read. George W. Bush could do it. Jimmy Carter could do it. I think that Barack Obama was pretty good at it, but I have so enjoyed media parities of him that they get in my way when I try to remember exactly how he sounded.

I hope this is not the end of this discussion. We love and encourage Braille. We love for people to use large print when they can. We want people to adopt any speaking style that a situation requires, and I don't think we've talked about the alternatives that will allow that to happen in a way that sounds natural and easy. I am always fishing for a piece we can use in the Braille Monitor, and may be a discussion on this list might be just what we need. We might have a panel discussion with opinions that converge and diverge. Maybe finding the right way means presenting people with several of them from which to choose. Maybe our discussions will create ways we have not thought of.

Warmly,

Gary 


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