Joel Harband (pictured to the left) heads Tuval
Software Industries, based in Israel. Their best known product
is Speech-Over
Studio, a PowerPoint add-in that enables PowerPoint slides
to incorporate narrations using automated voices.
Geetesh:
Tell us more about yourself, Tuval Software, and
Speech-Over Studio.
Joel:
I was born in San Francisco, studied engineering at UC Berkeley,
got a PhD in applied mathematics from NYU and moved to Israel
in 1970. After teaching in the university and working in
software, I founded Tuval Software Industries in 1990 to
develop Seela, a tool for software developers. Speech-Over
Studio is Tuval's second-generation product -- my second-generation
Israeli son Uzi joined me to develop it.
Speech-Over Studio is a PowerPoint plug-in that makes it
simple to add speech to presentations, so that you hear a
presenter even when he or she isn't there. Speech-Over Studio
replaces the recording studio with text-to-speech (TTS) on
the desktop. You type in narration text for a screen object
and an artificial voice 'speaks' it in the slide show when
the screen object animates. TTS technology has substantially
improved over the past decade, and voices now sound quite
real.
Speech-Over Studio has been chosen by Microsoft to participate
in their "early adopter" program for Office 2007.
Geetesh:
What are typical usage scenarios for Speech-Over Studio?
Joel:
Speech-Over Studio lets you archive an important one-time presentation
as a narrated stand-alone for people who did not attend (and
can't get the message from the slides alone) and you can
use it to computerize recurrent presentations, such as a
plant safety orientation. You can add a verbal dimension
to marketing presentations for Web distribution or trade
shows and you can create on-line audio/visual educational
and training courses easily. Finally, adding a verbal explanation
to PowerPoint-based corporate communications makes your ideas
and plans clearer to colleagues. We also envision applications
in assistive technology.
Geetesh:
Tell us about the new improvements in the product.
Joel:
The product has come a long way since it was first reviewed
in Indezine back in November 2005. The user interface is
now a lot simpler and intuitive. You add speech to a PowerPoint
screen item with only three clicks and it's ready to play.
A Speech-Over tool bar is now available as well as a streamlined
speech panel for displaying and manipulating the speech items
on the slide. The product is robust and has a crash recovery
feature that saves speech data. We've also learned how to
convert speech-empowered presentations to flash and mp4 for
web delivery and podcasting.
Geetesh:
What sort of support infrastructure do you provide?
Joel:
Support is by e-mail within one business day.
Geetesh:
Can you share some trivia with Indezine readers
-- an unusual use of Speech-Over Studio, a funny incident,
or just a tip?
Joel:
I recently met with the top sales people of a major Israeli
company to propose that they use Speech-Over Studio for
their sales presentations. Mistakenly assuming that they
exported their product, I prepared a sample PowerPoint
speech-empowered sales presentation with the American-accented
Paul TTS voice doing the selling. After a couple of minutes,
they looked at each other and said to me: "Very
nice, but we don't need English, can Paul speak Hebrew?
