On a recent visit to Prague I was haunted by an immense statue on Vitkov Hill which overlooks the city.
It is of Jan Zizka, a Czech general and Hussite leader, who fought in the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, with a Polish-Lithuanian army in defeating the Teutonic Order.
General Zizka is one of six commanders in history who were never defeated. The others, according to Wikipedia, were Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Genghis Khan, Alexander Suvorov, and Khalid ibn al-Walid (although they are not counting arguments they had with their wives).
Today, the battles we fight are not on such a grand scale. We don’t get a chance to fight the Teutonic Order but we’re still in a fight for our lives in the corporate world. They’re not big battles against massed troops. Today our enemies are the little mistakes that slip through the cracks. These errors that accumulate in our personnel folder and eventually determine our fate.
We at The Association prefer to believe that we are your strong ally as you wage your corporate battles by providing solutions to your challenges. We take full responsibility for projects and implement quality control measures to make sure the project’s a success over time.
It all adds up to quality and sustainability.
OUR ATTITUDE - We take the attitude of General Žižka into every project.
When we’re recording voice files, we don’t have to pull out the battleaxe to ward of the Teutonic Order. The enemies of today are much smaller but just as lethal. We have to guard against errors creeping into the voice file set like:
- incorrect vocabulary tree syntax
- disjointed phrase lists
- improper parsing of english phrases causing difficulty in other languages
- incorrect grammar
- scripts not localized
- words skipped by voice talent
- excessive mouth clicks etc.
- inconsistent volume, tonality, cadence, diction, warmth, inflection
- deviations from the script
- mislabelled voice files
- missing voice files
OUR WORKFLOW
When we began this work fourteen years ago as GPS systems were introduced to vehicles, we studied where errors creep in. We derived a checklist and workflow to detect and correct these errors. Richard Robinson, who produced voice files used in Great Britain’s mass transit systems, was the primary architect of our production line. To augment his efforts, we introduced Quality Control checkpoints before, during and after the recording process.
And the last step on the checklist is for three of our QC people listen to all the voice files independently to make sure all files are recorded correctly, labelled as scripted and that they fit seamlessly with the files we’ve already produced.
OUR RESULTS
As a result, we have maintained a 100% error free record since the beginning. We have never had to re-record a single voice file. Our clients have won the J.D. Power award for Excellence.
AN EXAMPLE
Here’s an example of the seamless voice files we produce (short files combining to make a smooth sentence) versus disjointed files others produce.
Click HERE for DISJOINTED voice files.
Click HERE for SEAMLESS*, natural sounding voice files.
*Seamless Voice Files. The phrases we record combine seamlessly into a coherent pleasant sentence that sounds like it was recorded all at once.
The Association has been providing voice files for in-vehicle navigation systems the longest of any vendor, beginning with the Clarion/Microsoft Auto PC project in 1999, The Association has the most successful production workflow which has provided over 64,000 error-free voice files to Alpine, Johnson Controls, IBM, deCarta, Boeing, Raytheon and others. In June, we completed a 22,400 voice file project recording “ordinary people” reading lines in eight languages to train computers to improve voice recognition scores.
Please call us at 818 841-9660 or 818 606-3538 to discuss how we can provide solutions for your voice file projects.
- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/#sthash.pO8ZJd6I.dpuf