Royal School of Artillery

Training Innovation Centre – Headquarters Royal School of Artillery

ReadSpeaker: What were your primary motivations for adopting Speechmaker? Did specific challenges play a role?

RSA: Our motivation to purchase Speechmaker was that it was becoming more challenging to get our in-house people to do voice-overs (VO) unless the recording could be done quickly or within a couple of hours.

Getting VOs updated were even more difficult, time consuming and even fortunate to get the same person back to re-record. A fluent live human voice is currently superior, but finding a good and willing narrator within our environment has always been the challenge.

I also saw it as a time saving product that gave greater control on how the script was written and spoken. Some of the scripts I’ve heard read out for VO have been poorly constructed, but this way we can tweak it to sound and flow better.

Depending on the subject matter, we may put some scripts through an AI engine to clean up the grammar and sentence construction.

ReadSpeaker: Were there any external factors to choosing to integrate Speechmaker (legislation, advisors, etc)

RSA: There were no factors to apply AI text-to-speech to any of our projects. We had dabbled a bit with some early text-to-speech but it was poor quality. It wasn’t until I saw and heard about Readspeaker at a trade show (Learning Technologies 2023) that the idea to integrate it into our working pattern emerged.

ReadSpeaker: Which platform or tools do you use?

RSA: We use a range of industry standard products from the leader suppliers.

ReadSpeaker: How will you integrate Speechmaker into your existing teaching methods?

RSA: Speechmaker is used by the designers within the Design Studio who create the eLearning material under the direction of the subject matter expert (SME).

ReadSpeaker: What factors influenced your selection of your Speechmaker provider?

RSA: At the time, May 2023, I was impressed by Readspeaker AI generated VO. This led me to research other providers that were also of comparable quality. The advantage Readspeaker Speechmaker had was the option for a standalone desktop solution, which gave us control of our VO scripts and publishing outputs.

ReadSpeaker: Did you face any organisational challenges during the implementation and integration? How did you overcome them?

RSA: No.

ReadSpeaker: Did you encounter any technical challenges? How was technical support handled and how effective was it?

RSA: No real technical challenges. I used our IT specialist to install the Desktop version for myself and a colleague. Use of the product is relatively intuitive, and we haven’t needed to lean on tech support.

ReadSpeaker: What are your future plans for using ReadSpeaker SpeechMaker?

RSA: Will continue to use, especially when giving old eLearning lessons a makeover with a new design.

ReadSpeaker: Would you recommend others to implement ReadSpeaker technology?

RSA: I have already informed other MOD Design Studios and I plan to write a blog on an MOD internal platform about what the RSA has gained from using Speechmaker technology.

ReadSpeaker: Would you recommend others to work with ReadSpeaker?

RSA: I would certainly put Readspeaker’s name in the ring.

Mr Dominic Coleman

A UK based graphic designer with nearly 35 years experience, Dominic started out as a paste-up-artist/ junior designer on the drawing board. From his first introduction to a computer in the early 1990’s, he progressed from creating basic visual learning aids to creating immersive interactive digital learning packages & products for the UK MOD.

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