Yesterday we installed the new blade centres and the new storage systems. I felt like a boy carrying around new toys. With this worm and fuzzy “Christmas eve just after opening the presents” feeling. When we arrived in the new hosting facility, looking down on the power outlet under the rack, my happiness slowly transformed into a more tiredsome mood. Two three phase 32Ampere sockets were staring in my eyes. If you read my previous post “from servers to blades”, you would understand why. All of a sudden, we didn’t have the correct power cords any more. Hi-tech never want to be easy.

Well, they managed to solve the problem. Cables were connected, lamps blinking, fans started to roar. And there it was. The rSpeak infrastructure was ready!

In a few days we will start beta testing our new range of products for private blogs and websites. If you would like to become one of the exclusive beta testers, please become a member by signing up on the VoiceCorp website.

Stay tuned!

I met one of our TTS suppliers the other day. Lars-Erik Larsson, the CEO of Acapela Group. He told me about their latest development being a service to create corporate voices for their text-to-speech engine. The coolest thing was that they could now offer it at a very reasonable cost thanks to a new technology and procedures they have developed. The Acapela Voice Factory. and it only takes between 3 weeks(!) for the simplest version and up to 14 weeks for the full quality version!

Still the cost level is not really reachable for private users, but there are other (free) alternatives as well like the FestVox with the Festival TTS platform (however you can not in any way compare the quality with the commercial solutions).

With a price tag starting at 7500€ (excluding the cost of the speaker) it is really reachable for a lot of companies that want to have a corporate TTS voice that can easily pay off by using TTS in to automate some customer support, automate switchboards, or just do it as a fun thing in for example interactive web campaigns. But you would also need to buy licenses for the engine itself if you want to use it. But that is a very reasonable cost in such a project.

Is there a market? Sure. Lets say we have two car manufacturer that want to integrate speech into their cars. Obviously, Volvo would not want to use the same voice as Saab for instance. You must hear the difference . Some companies today have a corporate voice that they use in all radio and TV commercials, and wouldn’t it be great to have that voice talent also answering the phone on 30 lines at the same time?

However, if you have dreamt of immortality, this is one step closer. But if you decide to give up your voice up to a TTS engine, there are a couple of things you should be aware of.

• Your voice can technically be used to speak very dirty words and there is always the risk of people using it in a very very bad way.
• You can never really use your voice as something that identify that it is actually you. I.e. quite a problem if you also happens to be a big fan of speech verification systems…

The target group for corporate voices are mainly, well, corporations. Congratulations Acapela-Group!

Since we started with our speaking web services about 9 years ago we have grown quite a bit. Growing from a lonely Sun Ultra 5 back in 2000 to about 50 high capacity servers of various kinds today. That’s a whole lot of servers…

Managing that number of servers is not the easiest task, and wow how much space they take.

We have now designed a brand new infrastructure for our future needs based on Linux clusters based on IBM blade centres. We have also invested in a real powerful SAN (Storage Area Network) over the iScsi protocol. A very competitive priced solution compared to Fibre Channel based SAN’s. Almost the same result for only a fraction of the cost. Anyway, going from “normal” rack servers to something like a Blade Centre was not just start working with another server. With our “normal” servers, we are used to configure, plug in network cables, plug in power cord and off you go!

When our brand new 14 slot Blade centre arrived the other day, we noted that it was not just to plug in the power cords. Instead of a usual one, it was a (very large) plug completely unknown to us. But wait! There are some good old fashion power cables! almost… After a call to IBM they kindly advised us to invest in a 1300€ PDU (Power distribution Unit) that was to be connected to 3 phase electricity. To that we could easily plug this “almost normal” power cables to. We understood that this is not just another server; this was a whole new level of computer infrastructure.

Anyway, the new Infrastructure is now up and running and I must say; if you currently have 10+ servers and you plan to grow quite a bit. Invest in blade centres!

And it´s better for the environment too! They are not consuming by far as much electricity (per server) compared to rack ones. Also they does not require as much cooling either. From a management point of view it is brand new world. And EVERYTHING is redundant! I fell like a happy kid. Pretty much the same feeling I experienced the day when my mom upgraded my first computer (the C64) to the brand new Amiga 1000