Meet the Real Siri and Other Iconic Voices of Technology

Ever wonder who the people behind the voices are that you hear coming from behind our favourite technologies and public services? Let Dave Lee introduce to you to a few of them from Siri, the London Underground, and more in this article for the BBC News site.”

via BBC News

Meet the real Siri, and three other iconic voices of everyday technology.

Millions of people hear their voices every day – but would you recognise them if you saw them walking down the street?

Well maybe now you will.

The BBC met the faces behind four of the most famous and iconic voices heard in technology today.

Jon Briggs – The British ‘Siri’

Siri, Apple’s voice-powered personal assistant, made its debut in June 2010. Since then, millions of the devices with the feature have been sold worldwide.

In the UK, the voice you will hear responding to commands belongs to Jon Briggs, an illustrious voiceover artist whose portfolio includes the likes of the Weakest Link, Radio 2 and Channel 4.

Jon had offered up his voice to a firm that specialises in computer-generated speech – that is, taking Jon’s voice but moulding it to say virtually any possible phrase. Apple, when creating Siri, picked out Jon – unbeknownst to him.

“I discovered that I was being used as the voice of Siri when Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC technology correspondent, suddenly started demonstrating it on BBC Breakfast.

“I thought ‘I recognise that voice!’, and so it was true – and it’s a slightly bizarre journey since then.”

It means that while his voice is now being played out countless times a day all over the country, Apple has not paid him – he only received the fee earned he when recording the original material.

But, he says he’s excited to be “in early” on what he believes is changing how we use technology.

“You can take a photograph of your desk – there is a screen a keyboard and a mouse.

“You will show it to your children or your grandchildren and they will laugh and go ‘you had a thing called a mouse? What’s that funny thing with letters on?’”

Emma Clarke – Voice of the London Underground

Emma’s voice can be heard on several London Underground lines

In contrast to the received pronunciation of her “Tube” voice, Emma Clarke’s speaking voice is in fact Northern – growing up, as she did, in Sale near Manchester.

Her voice can be heard across the Bakerloo, Central and District lines of London’s iconic Underground network.

The process of getting the job was long and painstaking – months of focus groups and whittling down possible candidates. During the selection, each possible voice was given a codename. Emma’s, apparently, was ‘Marilyn’.

“Had they named me ‘Brenda’ I’m not sure I’d have got the gig,” she jokes.

She now gets fan mail from all over the world, particularly from Texas.

“People initially thought I was actually on the train!” she says, “Or in some kind of central control room. I don’t know where they thought it was.”

She says she is proud to lend her voice to the network, but adds that she hopes some of the lines she recorded never have to be heard by the public.

“There were a couple of emergency announcements, that I remember when I read them on the script I thought ‘oh god, imagine how these people will feel when they hear these announcements.

“I felt such a sense of responsibility, of calming people down.”

Terry Green – ‘Cashier number three, please!’

Unlike the other voices in this piece, Terry Green is the only one who doesn’t consider his voice to be his profession.

He found his way to audio fame indirectly. He specialises in customer service, and the systems used in shops to get things moving and punters through the tills.

And so it was, when the company he was working for needed a male voice to beckon people to the till, he stepped forward: “Cashier number three, please…”

“We just sat down with a digital voice recorder, laid down the track, and that was it! I was on the prototype system, and then suddenly rolled out to 8,000 shops.”

They recorded up to cashier number 25 – but now the system goes much further. Indeed, around the world, the company’s technology is used in thousands of stores – although with local voices instead of Terry’s.

Now he makes his living as a leading expert on the study of shoppers’ behaviour.

“My voice was on all these systems that we were rolling out, so I was becoming more and better known. I started writing white papers, and eventually I came to write a book.”

Sara Mendes da Costa – The Speaking Clock

Sara was unveiled as the latest voice of the speaking clock in 2007

One morning, Sara Mendes da Costa was listening to Terry Wogan on Radio 2 when he mentioned that a competition would be held to find the new voice of the Speaking Clock.

“A little bell rang in my head and I went ‘oooh!’”

She wasn’t alone – within moments she had had calls friends and family saying she should put herself forward.

She won, and from 2007 she took over the voice of the Speaking Clock, which is called up approximately 60 million times each year.

It was a job she was excited, but nervous, to take on.

“Brian Cobby, who sadly passed away last year, had the most beautiful, rich, Shakespearian voice.

“Then I came along – I have visions of people going ‘oh…’!”

“But they wanted something different, someone a bit more of the moment, a little bit more who we are now.”

Sara uses the Speaking Clock regularly in her day-to-day work, and admits she just can’t resist listening to each and every word.

“I listen until when it goes through to ‘precisely’ – and only then I can hang up!

“It’s just a weird thing that I’ve got.”

Google’s Next Big Project: Beat Death

The irony is so thick you could cut it with a light saber. According to this article by Nick Kolakowski featured on Slashdot, Google is going head to head with the grim reaper. The search giant, who has already made us immortal by collecting our information and storing it forever, now wants us to live forever. If successful, we will be able to search forever for the information it stores about us forever. Think of the implications for lifelong learning … ”

via Slashdot

Calico will focus on health-related issues, specifically aging and associated diseases.

Google has created a new company, Calico, with a mighty task: beat back death, or at least ensure that people live in better health for longer.

Calico will focus on health-related issues, specifically aging and related diseases. Art Levinson, the former CEO of Genentech, will serve as Chief Executive Officer.

In a posting on his Google Plus page, Google CEO Larry Page acknowledged that a medical-research firm is well outside Google’s usual focus. “But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives,” he wrote. “So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses.” Any investments in Calico, he added, will remain small in comparison to Google’s core business operations.

Aging is something that affects every living organism, of course, and it seems as if Calico will tackle the host of degradations that come along with it, from decreased mental acuity to the inability to physically move from Point A to B. In a separate press release, Page summarized the project as “moonshot thinking.”

If recent research into medical issues is any indication, Calico will need to employ the latest and greatest data-analytics tools if it wants to make any headway. Private tech firms such as IBM, as well as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government agencies, are all pouring millions of dollars into medical-oriented Big Data research. NIH, for example, recently announced that it would sign over $24 million per year to the Big Data to Knowledge Centers of Excellence, investigator-initiated facilities that will research data science. “The ability of researchers to locate, analyze, and use Big Data (and more generally all biomedical and behavioral data) is often limited for reasons related to access to relevant software and tools, expertise, and other factors,” read a note posted on NIH’s BD2K Webpage.

Hospitals are also getting into the game, announcing alliances with tech firms on data-analytics initiatives. Take Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, which announced in February that it had partnered with IBM and WellPoint to train the Watson supercomputing platform in processing and interpreting oncology data; similar efforts are underway across the country.

Given Google’s ability to store and analyze massive amounts of data, and its army of sophisticated engineers, it’s certainly capable of a mighty medical-analytics effort. But conquer death? That still might prove an impossible goal.

10 Social Media Skills for the 21st Century

Our Kids Can’t Wait….we have a moral obligation

By: Phyllis Lockett

About a decade ago in Chicago, there were at least 27 communities, mostly concentrated on the south and west sides, where over 75 percent of the schools failed state standards. Since then, we’ve helped open 80 new schools and set the bar for citywide improvements to public education, but the truth is that the zip code you are born in in this city still can define your life’s trajectory.

If you are a kid growing up in one of these communities today, unless you are lucky enough to get into a magnet, selective enrollment, or charter school, you have a 60 percent chance of graduating from high school. If you drop out, you have a 75 percent chance of being unemployed, and a very high risk of being incarcerated. Of the 30,000 freshmen who enter CPS high schools, only 8 percent will earn a college degree.

Yet, I have seen firsthand the power of next-generation personalized learning models that accelerate student achievement and increase student engagement while improving teacher satisfaction. Schools where teachers pinpoint each student’s needs, fast-track remediation, and exponentially advance students to the next level.

I have also seen the potential cost savings that these models can deliver, a concern in cities across the country, including Chicago, where the school system faces a $1 billion deficit each year.

Impossible? Go check out Chavez Elementary, a traditional public school in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood where 7th graders take algebra and advance to geometry as soon as they are ready. Or KIPP Create in our Austin community, and see how they achieved the greatest literacy gains among all KIPP campuses nationwide.

Education technology is a $1 billion industry in America, with accelerators and incubators popping up on both costs. It has caught the attention of policy makers, districts, educators and families nationally and right here in Chicago.

Yet, little is known about what tech tools actually work. Plus, educators are often on their own to integrate stuff developed far from experts in teaching and learning.

That is why I am starting LEAP Innovations, to hasten the introduction of next-generation of teaching and learning. The LEAP Innovation Hub offers a new and systematic approach to evaluating what works in the edtech marketplace. We will advance personalized learning to prepare Americans for 21st century skills by supporting pilot studies of instructional technology in schools and other learning environments, conducting research, and providing training space and programs to connect educators, entrepreneurs, tech companies, learning scientists, and students to create next-generation learning school designs, share ideas and co-develop solutions for critical learning gaps.

Chicago is home to the nation’s third largest public school district, the largest Catholic school district, and one of the largest city college populations. Our region is a microcosm of the nation, so solutions developed can be used here – as well as nationally.

Across the country, we can no longer wait for innovative models of teaching and learning to pop up in isolation. That was just the beginning. We have to work together across all school models and learning environments to blend the best of what we have with the education technology innovations that are expanding rapidly across the globe.

Our kids can’t wait.

U.S. Lags Behind in Social Progress

n many ways the U.S. economy powers the global economy. The dollar is the global currency and English is the language of global business. Despite three generations of dominance in global trade and breaktaking wealth creation for business elite, social progress has slowed in American. Life, health, and opportunity is better for the average person in many other countries–that’s the tough truth told by the Social Progress Index 2014 Report.

“Economic growth without social progress results in lack of inclusion, discontent, and social unrest,” according to the report co-authored by Harvard economist and business advisor Michael Porter. The report recommends “twin scorecards of success” where “social progress sits alongside economic prosperity.”

The report is project of the Skoll Foundation sponsored Social Progress Imperative which seeks “to improve the quality of lives of people around the world, particularly the least well off, by advancing global social progress.” Social progress is defined as the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens and communities to enhance and sustain the quality of their lives, and create the conditions for all individuals to reach their full potential.

The Initiative sponsored the development of an index to measure outcomes in social and environmental areas in comparable ways across countries.

• Basic human needs: nutrition, medical care, shelter, and safety
• Foundations of wellbeing: access to basic knowledge; access to information and communication, health and wellness, economic sustainability; and
• Opportunity: personal rights, freedom and choice, tolerance and inclusion, and access to advanced education

The report concludes that “the top three countries in the world in terms of social progress are New Zealand, Switzerland, and Iceland.”

The U.S. ranks second on GDP per capita but is 16th on the list with a score bolstered by access to advanced education but penalized by poor health outcomes (70th place despite spending more than any country) and weak access to basic knowledge (39th place on factors including high school enrollment and adult literacy) and access to information and communication (23rd place on indicators like cell phone subscriptions).

The report underscores the importance of access to quality health care for both social progress and prosperity–as well as how inefficient American health care is (i.e., high cost, terrible outcomes) and how unfortunate it is that U.S. political parties talk past each other rather than dealing with the hard facts laid out in this report (and many others).

Like healthcare, the report points out that access to quality primary and secondary education and access to broadband are essential to economic and social progress.

For those interested in creating smart cities–urban hubs of prosperity and progress–the implications are clear. Cities should make sure that

• families in every zip code have access to great K-12 schools (and, like New Orleans, failing schools should be eliminated by improving or closing them);
• all students have access to full and part time online learning, including world languages, college courses, and career and technical education;
• students receive strong guidance services;
• a web of youth and family services are available; and
• broadband is widely and freely available and inexpensive at home (free for low income families with children)

Thanks to Fareed Zakaria GPS for a great interview with Michael Porter on the Social Progress Index.

15 Ways to Keep Creativity in the #EdChat Conversation

Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning

Today Digital Promise and Getting Smart released “Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning: Competency-Based Teacher Preparation and Development.” This white paper outlines the attributes of next-generation teacher preparation and makes recommendations to support the development of teacher preparation and development systems.

Co-authored by Getting Smart’s Tom Vander Ark and Dr. Carri Schneider with Karen Cator, President and CEO ofDigital Promise, the paper outlines how the role of teachers is changing amid broader shifts to personalized, blended, and deeper learning. In order for the current state of teacher preparation, professional development, and accreditation to evolve accordingly, the authors recommend professional learning opportunities that offer:

• Some element of teacher control over time, place, path and/or pace;

• Balance between teacher-defined goals, goals as defined by administration through teacher evaluation efforts, and school and district educational goals;

• Job-embedded and meaningful integration into classroom practice; and

• Competency-based progression.

In addition to the paper, don’t miss the complementary infographic, “Competency-Based Teacher Preparation & Professional Development,” that offers a visual outline of the paper content.

For more information, download the paper.

The full press release is copied below.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 Digital Promise and Getting Smart Share Vision for Preparing Teachers For Deeper Learning

 White Paper Provides Guidance and Recommendations to Equip Teachers to Thrive in Deeper Learning Environments

 SEATTLE, WA (May 1, 2014) – Education advocacy firm, Getting Smart, in association with the education innovation nonprofit, Digital Promise, today released, “Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning: Competency-Based Teacher Preparation and Development,” a white paper that outlines the attributes of next-generation teacher preparation and makes recommendations to support teacher preparation and development systems.

This paper is co-authored by Tom Vander Ark, CEO of Getting Smart, Dr. Carri Schneider, Director of Policy and Research of Getting Smart, and Karen Cator, President and CEO of Digital Promise. In addition to the paper, a complementary infographic, “Competency-Based Teacher Preparation & Professional Development,” offers a visual outline of the paper’s big ideas.

The paper outlines how the role of teachers is changing amid broader shifts to personalized, blended, and deeper learning. In order for the current state of teacher preparation and development to evolve accordingly, the authors recommend professional learning opportunities that echo the type of personalized learning that is recommended for students:

• Some element of teacher control over time, place, path and/or pace;

• Balance between teacher-defined goals, goals as defined by administration through teacher evaluation efforts, and school and district educational goals;

• Job-embedded and meaningful integration into classroom practice; and

• Competency-based progression.

 “Drawing on examples from outside of the field of education as well as innovators in higher education and K-12, we build the case for competency-based teacher education,” said Vander Ark. “In the same way that student assessment is evolving to prioritize demonstrations of mastery over basic proficiency, competency-based teacher development would enable pre-service and practicing teachers to demonstrate knowledge and skills at regular intervals.”

“The design and implementation of a system of micro-credentials could support a shift to competency-based pathways for educators,” said Cator. “Such a system would include explanations of competencies, multiple opportunities to develop and learn, and a way to demonstrate and prove proficiency.”

“Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning” is the third in a series of papers from Getting Smart that explore how a focus on Deeper Learning competencies is changing the nature of teaching and learning in order to personalize instruction and better prepare students for college and career.

On Friday, President Obama directed the U.S. Department of Education to lay out a plan to strengthen America’steacher preparation programs for public discussion by this summer, and to move forward on schedule to publish a final rule within the next year. The Administration will encourage and support states in developing systems that recognize excellence and provide all programs with information to help them improve, while holding them accountable for how well they prepare teachers to succeed in today’s classrooms and throughout their careers.

“Rightfully so, the national conversation around personalization has been driven by what’s best for students,” said Schneider. “We are just beginning to scratch the surface of the possibilities for personalized learning to impact the teaching profession.”

To learn more download the full paper.

To learn more about Digital Promise’s work to reimagine teacher credentials, check out Digital Promise Micro-Credentials.

Creating Innovative Ecosystems

By: Alex Hernandez

When it comes to education innovation, all cities are not created equal.

San Jose is the Mesopotamia of blended learning with Summit Public Schools, Rocketship Education, Alpha Public Schools, KIPP Bay Area, and Milpitas Unified School District all within a few miles of a bustling coffeehouse where new education ideas are brewed and served daily. Khan Academy and EdSurge are headquartered a few miles north on the 101 Highway. And the Silicon Schools Fund provides early-stage philanthropy for new breakthrough school models.

New Orleans is home to 4.0 Schools, an incubator that brings together communities of educators to prototype new solutions to real problems. New Schools for New Orleans provides capital, coaching and startup support for educators launching high-quality, new schools. And Teach for America fuels the Crescent City’s entrepreneurial spirit with over 1,200 mission-driven corp members and alumni.

New education ideas are flourishing in places like Baltimore, Boise and Memphis, cities with relatively little activity just a few short years ago.

Innovative cities tend to have some common characteristics:

Courageous, early-stage capital. Education entrepreneurs need money to pursue their bold ideas and innovative ecosystems have philanthropists and for-profit investors with an appetite for investing at the earliest stages.

Places to tinker, prototype and meet other education innovators. Organizations like 4.0 Schools, the Digital Harbor Foundation and Startup Weekend EDU provide safe spaces for educators to lean into new ideas and meet other like-minded innovators.

People, people, people. Innovative ecosystems are home to organizations that attract talent and develop tomorrow’s leaders. For example, Dan Carroll, co-founder of the successful edtech startup Clever, began his career as a Teach for America corp member and was a teacher at STRIVE Prep, a successful charter school network. Organizations like TFA and STRIVE are magnets for talent and set the foundation for future innovation.

Support to launch new ventures. Innovative ecosystems are places where educators see a path to bring their ideas to life. This means access to capital, talent, advisors and other supports that make the difference between success and failure.

There has never been a better time to be an education entrepreneur. And whether they know it or not, cities compete to attract our best talent. The good news: cities can significantly increase education innovation through targeted, strategic investment.

9 Things Every Parent with an Anxious Child Should Try

A Survey of Performance Assessment and Mastery Tracking Tools

It’s testing season and lots of kids are taking multiple choice tests–more online than last year but lots of the same old item types. It’s part of a 100 year old ‘teach then test’ cycle of assessment as a summative activity.

At some schools, projects and multi-step tasks supplement more traditional forms of teaching and learning–they extend and apply learning and provide a form of alternative assessment. At a few thousand schools (most are part of Deeper Learning networks) the instructional program is a sequence of performance tasks. These schools have made the shift from assessment of learning to performance assessment as learning.

Performance assessment, as detailed in a December post, is the application of knowledge, skills, and work habits through the performance of tasks that are meaningful and engaging to students.” Performance assessments make new standards real, personalize learning and can serve as authentic gateways in competency-based systems.

The problem is that it’s hard to string together a series of performance tasks for every student that challenges them in interesting and appropriate ways while reflecting common standards. An exemplary system would be a full learning management system with a library of prompts, projects, instructional materials, standards-based rubrics, scoring and communication tools. A super gradebooks, a robust portfolio, implementation support, and professional development would round out the desired platform attributes.

New report. Despite marked progress in the last year, the tools for creating and managing performance assessments and tracking student progress are still inadequate for teams creating next-generation learning environments–that’s the conclusion of new market research report on the status of performance assessment tools.

“Assessing Deeper Learning: A Survey of Performance Assessment and Mastery Tracking Tools” was developed for Envision Learning Partners and partner organizations Asia Society, ConnectEd and New Tech Network. They share a common interest in better performance assessment tools.

The report outlined numerous barriers to better performance assessment including:

• A wide range of performance tasks and the open-ended nature of the responses make it challenging to build generalizable capabilities;
• No recognized standards or best practices in measuring non-cognitive variables;
• Attempts to add flexibility add steps to construct a standards-based performance task; and
• Tools specific to school networks are not available or useful outside the network.

Twelve key features identified as important by the sponsors include interoperability, calibration of scores, a library of tasks, support for multiple revisions and collaboration, standards-based project rubrics, available professional development, reporting tools, customization, student portfolio development, an updated user experience and an affordable price tag.

The most promising performance assessment tools reviewed in the report is ShowEvidence, a new product nearing final release and used by some of the sponsor networks. Project Foundry is a similar project-based learning tool used by the Edvisions School network. Additional investment would support improved functionality and scalability of both.

The report also compiled a list of mastery tracking tools. While there has been improvement in this category as well with products like Engrade, Kickboard, and JumpRope, applications are still inadequate for managing a fully competency-based environment.

Performance assessment and mastery tracking are an example of categories where leading schools are out in front of the market. A combination of philanthropic and venture investment could quickly improve products in these categories and fuel the next-generation of schools.