DAISY Generator V2 Released

Phoneticom releases version 2 of DAISY Generator

In the first quarter of 2003, Phoneticom introduced the first version of DAISY Generator version 1, a high capacity server-based production system for converting various types of structured electronic documents (like XML) into Text-to-speech rendered Digital Talking Book’s validating to the DAISY standard. The system has now been used successfully in many countries. Mostly, our customers consist of libraries or educational institutions that produce literature in DAISY format, for students with reading or visual disabilities. Most common input formats are DAISY 2.02 XHTML, HTML saved from MSWord, custom XML formats, and DTBook (DAISY 3) XML. Students can then rapidly receive full-text DAISY books narrated with high-quality text-to-speech. Books can be delivered over Internet, or shipped to them on CD.

We have now learned from our customers about new features they need and we now announce a new version and present some of the new or improved features. In general, speed and memory consumption is improved. Books consisting of about 5 000 files and 100 000 sentences, constituting about 80 hours of speech has been produced successfully by some customers.

Improved Web-Based User Interface

The web-based interface has been extended with more functions. It is now possible to produce a draft/preview version of the DAISY book that shows NCC structure, content document layout and a corresponding document showing how the applied dictionary affects the text that will be sent to the TTS. The TTS is not used when producing the draft so that mistakes in structure or pronunciation can be corrected before using the TTS and producing the final copy of the book. This is useful if TTS usage is paid for per hour of produced speech. When re-producing a book, files do not need to be uploaded again, it is now possible to select among earlier uploaded productions.

Plug-in Support

DAISY Generator works with originals in structured XML formats, but sometimes this is not the originals received from publishers or produced internally by the customer. This means that more advanced conversion, beyond XSLT, may be necessary. It is now possible to connect "input plug-ins" that are stand-alone applications that can be executed by the DAISY Generator, before the book is produced. One of our customers uses such a plug-in to build XML documents from a database containing information about newly produced DAISY titles. Another customer uses a plug-in to build an XML file from a zip archive of Word documents, one for each page, resulting from scanning/OCR of the original pages.

Plug-ins may be more advanced than described above. It could fetch information from the web, automatically producing a DAISY book containing weekly time tables for different TV channels. Analogous to input plug-ins, DAISY Generator also supports "output plug-ins" that can handle automatic distribution of the produced DAISY file set, for example sending it with ftp to a remote server where user's can access them, or sending them to a CD burner. The web-based user interface is just one way of publishing using Phoneticom DAISY Generator.

Batch Processing

If you have multiple books that should be published, you can now start all of them at once. If you have only purchased a one concurrent production license, DAISY Generator will queue them on the server and start producing them as soon as a free license becomes ready. Let DAISY Generator do the night shift for you.

Mix different voices or languages in the same DAISY book

Phoneticom DAISY Generator now supports controlling of the TTS using Audio Style sheets. This is done by server-side rendering of many of the constructs found in ACSS. Of course, the capabilities of the used TTS system also affects what is possible but speed, pitch, volume and pitch-range can be controlled for different sentences or structural elements of the book. You can automatically switch between different voices for different parts of the book if for example the language of the content is marked up correctly. Another useful application is to insert pauses or special content at certain places, for example reading of the word "page" before reading page numbers or controlling pauses before or after headings. As far as we know, our production system is the first to support ACSS.

Finally, we want to mention that we still keep the concepts proved to be useful: Automatic production, distributed work-flow, server-based tools accessed using web browsers that supports operating system independence for end-users and resource sharing where multiple users can access the same server over Internet. As it is compatible with almost all TTS engines on the market, platform independent, it can be used with a wide range of Voices and qualities.

Free upgrade for existing customer

The new version of Phoneticom DAISY Generator will be available, free of charge, to all existing customers.

For more information

Please contact Niclas Bergstrom at Phoneticom AB, Bredgrand 6, 753 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Phone +46 18 13 68 00, email, daisy@phoneticom.com