Archive for March, 2010

Roger Ebert’s new voice

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Text to speech engines have long been used to allow those who cannot talk to communicate verbally. Film critic Roger Ebert, who lost his lower jaw and his voice to cancer, has taken it a step further by creating a TTS voice that sounds like him.

Using the hundreds of hours of archived film clips from his reviews and other TV appearances, Ebert’s voice was reconstructed by Scotland’s CereProc, a developer of text to speech technology.

Debuting his new voice on Tuesday on Oprah, Ebert said, “You’ll know it’s a computer, but one that sounds like me. It still needs improvement but at least it sounds like me. In first grade they said I talked too much, and now I still can.”

Create an Audio, SMS and Instant Message Resume with Tropo Scripting

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Getting noticed in the job market today gives you an edge. One edge is to create an audio resume that you may give out to show your developer prowess. Using the Tropo multi-channel capabilities, you may then allow that resume to interact with your perspective employer via SMS or even Instant Message.

Whats more, using Tropo Scripting you may create this resume and host it on our servers with no need for your own server or sending mark-up back and forth. And, you may do this in Groovy, Javascript, PHP, Python, Ruby or all of them to show off your polyglot skills.

For this example resume we will use a Ruby script hosted on Tropo.com to make John Doe’s background available (also available on Github here):

answer
say "Welcome to John Doe's audio resume."

listening = true
while listening
  result = ask "Please press 1 to hear an overview of John's resume, please press 2 to listen to his most recent experience or press 3 to connect to John and hire him!", { 'attempts' => 3, 'choices' => '1, 2, 3', 'onBadChoice' => lambda { say 'Invalid entry, please try again.' } }

  case result.value
  when '1'
    say 'Adept at managing all aspects of information technology, including ongoing business needs assessment, software development and implementation.'
    sleep 2
  when '2'
    say 'John served as the IT Director at ABC Insurance. John is a direct manager of a team of 6 people charged with delivery of enterprise level projects.'
    sleep 2
  when '3'
    transfer 'tel:+14155551234'
  else
    say 'Thank you for your time, goodbye.'
    listening = false
  end
end

hangup

You may call and listen to John Doe’s on 1 (408) 940-5947. To get started writing your own you may register for a free Tropo developer account, with a free phone number, here.