Narration Scripts

Hi Kevin,

Interesting question and ideas on what you'd like to see. I know that Text to speech was a popular feature for folks who wanted notes and audio to be available to learners throughout the course but I'd love to understand your needs a bit further.

For a teleprompter style notes view - would that sync with the audio? Where would that display for the learner? 

Within Review 360, the comments and feedback will be associated with screenshots on the page, but you're right there isn't an option to send along specific audio feedback. I'll be happy to share that with the team! 

Hello Ashley,

First of all what a pleasure to interface with such an esteemed and highly regarded Articulate expert. I’ve seen many of your postings and found them valuable. So thank you. My responses below:

Interesting question and ideas on what you'd like to see.

I know that Text to speech was a popular feature for folks who wanted notes and audio to be available to learners throughout the course but I'd love to understand your needs a bit further.

So I work in a highly regulated environment. The need to have various reviewers look at and review narration scripting alongside the content as they work through it in Review 360 is very, very helpful. But as an instructional developer the ability to write my scripts with full text editing capability right in all the Articulate products where that makes sense (I’m talking Storyline, Engage, Quizmaker, Rise and then roundtripping of narration scripts from and to a given project in Review 360) would be exceedingly useful and here’s why. Let’s say you have a project and it involves the legal team, HR, a product team, etc. Each of those people is very quickly writing, polishing and editing and entering their comments through 360 into the process. But especially at the formative stages the ability to create good quality narration depends on simply flawless narration writing tools. The ability not only to preview that WITH Text to Speech but simply the ability to see it in written form and then the ability to mark it up and then accept those changes is really vital.

Under separate cover I suggested “roundtripping”, i.e. the notion that when I make a change in one product it’s reflected in all the places I have inserted that product content without exception. So let’s say I’ve created an engage interaction – and I put in narration, I change slide content based on content revision suggestions, I change the order of things in the Engage Interaction. I should see those changes almost simultaneously reflected in Review 360, within Storyline if I’ve inserted it, etc. And why is this seemingly innocuous or useless concept so vital? Because organizations are working much, much, much faster. If we look at market leaders in the software start-up space – the people who are “winning” are those who can update quickly. If those teams use 360 – the changes I suggested become vital. Imagine that Boeing is one of your customers. They’re working on pilot training for one of their huge projects. Imagine the sheer number of reviewers involved. These concepts become simply vital. But even in an organization like mine that’s more modest with people wearing multiple hats we must remain agile and we must develop very fast and accurately – and the quality must be flawless.

For a teleprompter style notes view - would that sync with the audio? Where would that display for the learner?

The teleprompter would be for the individual recording the narration. But is this same ability, the ability to sync narration in video and elsewhere useful for learners?

Ask yourself a more basic question – what are media content providers doing. Netflix KNOWS that subtitles are hugely popular. So much so that now I can watch a German movie with German subtitles or English subtitles, or French or whatever I like. But I can also change the narration into one of several languages.

So can we afford to be far behind as instructional developers? Is Gen Y going to check out on us if we don’t do this.

But the teleprompter itself is a different product in my mind from what the Millennials need.

It’s for the narration recorder.

I think you could create a great web-based product that embeds in all the apps replacing several tools. I’d call it TalkToMe or something like it. (The marketing I’ll leave to someone else☺)

I would think about audio narration (both the type where I record my voice) as well as text to speech, plus teleprompter and closed captioning all in one. I think there’s justification for it – financial justification. Some industries are required to do CC anyway so if the latest CC standard could be used for a broader audience I think the development of this type of functionality that integrates with each and every Articulate product might not just be justified. It could be the future of e-Learning.

But for now – I would do the following:

· Next release embed a real WYSWIG editor for narration in every single app where narration is supported.

· Update Review 360 so that all narration flows through to it and so that reviewers can supply feedback on narration. This alone is a HUGE, HUGE boon. Why wouldn’t you hear about this? An unidentified need? Simple. People “make do”.
Within Review 360, the comments and feedback will be associated with screenshots on the page, but you're right there isn't an option to send along specific audio feedback. I'll be happy to share that with the team!

Kevin Handy

Kevin,

Wow! Thank you for all this detail. I can see how much thought you've put into this and how important this would be for your workflow. I'll be happy to pass it along to the team, but please keep in mind our feature request process and product roadmapping is not an overnight change. 😉  We work hard to plan and adjust throughout the year and here's a bit more about how we work to prioritize feature requests.

Also, I noticed that your email signature came through when you replied via email. You can remove that if you would like by clicking Edit beneath your response. Here’s a quick Peek video if you need help.

Ashley thank you for responding so quickly. I revised with my signature line removed and left my name. Thank you for referring this to your product dev team.