Prompting specialists have been successfully providing scrolling displays in some fashion, however rudimentary in the early days, for more than 50 years. The nagging question has always been how to reduce, or negate, the operational variables inherent in the individual operating skills and technical comfort levels of the user.
Traditionally, the presenter either has to trust the professional operator whose job it is to scroll the prompt, or use hand or foot controls to control it for themselves. Operators need to be semi-telepathic and immune to fatigue or loss of attention, and presenters are often under pressure and may prefer not to have the extra burden of self-operation.
The folks at Autoscript often wondered whether an automatic prompter was possible—one that scrolled itself as you read from it—and customer enthusiasm for this suggestion led them to seek out a solution. As luck would have it, they spoke to industry friends at SysMedia who had been looking at applications of speech technology in the realm of subtitling since 1998, and the seeds of the new idea were sown.
We’re all familiar with desktop speech recognizers, and it may seem obvious to harness this technology in pursuit of the self-scrolling prompter. However, although realtime speech recognition is possible, it requires the recognition engine to be trained for some hours to the voice of an individual speaker, and for speakers to articulate clearly and precisely in order to get accurate results.
Moreover, it can take up to two seconds for what has been said to be recognized and delivered. Therefore, conventional speech recognition technology is not adequate for the specialist job of realtime prompter control, and SysMedia’s new Speech Follower engine was used instead as the basis for a new solution.
“VoicePlus” is the name given to the new system, developed as a result of an exclusive collaboration between Autoscript and SysMedia, the respective prompting and subtitling/captioning specialists. The concept is very simple: As you read the prompt, it scrolls in time with what you’re saying so that the text you need to read remains in the right place. If you speed up, it speeds up; if you slow down, it slows down.
And it needs no training—the system responds to the voice of any speaker. VoicePlus puts the reader in control, with no extra effort.
VoicePlus is specifically designed to work with Autoscript’s acclaimed WinPlus product range, which is in thousands of studios and newsrooms worldwide. With VoicePlus installed in an Autoscript prompting system, all you need to do is read.
The benefits of incorporating speech-following technology into a prompting solution are substantial. The ability to automatically scroll the prompt in time with the spoken word of the talent completely eliminates the need for manual control.
Plus, a presenter can disable VoicePlus control at the press of a button and enable it again at any time. This provides an elegant, user-friendly process that provides maximum flexibility to ad lib.
Moreover, if a presenter stumbles badly or elects to skip an entire paragraph, he can manually wind the text on and reengage VoicePlus once he’s back on track. The ability to do this saves users considerable amounts of time, money and aggravation compared to traditional, keyboard-based input and tracking.
While VoicePlus isn’t practical for use in a crowded newsroom or in noisy outside environments (such as the streets of Manhattan), it shines in the natural environment for which it was designed, including presenter-to-camera or voiceover applications.
Andrew Lambourne is chief executive officer of SysMedia. Brian Larter is managing director of Autoscript.
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