The Stockdale paradox is a fascinating thing, but to paraphrase it for a corporate project point of view:
While you’re going to hit your delivery in the end. Don’t get overexcited, don’t over promise and under deliver as it wears your team and the other people on the project out and dispirits them. This philosophy works most practically in those hard grinds or crisis situations when delivering complex projects as you’re working through multiple options for delivery.
Getting overexcited about each one of your sub deliveries on a project is mentally very tiring for both your team and your clients, and it leads to a culture of avoiding disappointment. So people who are attempting to fix something for you, if you overhype it and it then doesn’t work they don’t want to tell you. Whereas if you go “right!, we’re gonna get there in the end, This is just option one, let’s go for it.” If option one doesn’t work, then they’re willing to tell you because even though you maintain your positivity, you’re not getting over optimistic and putting additional pressure on people that they don’t need.
Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
– James Stockdale on “which prisoners didn’t make it out of Vietnam”
If you’re listening to this and you’re hearing the sound of a slightly old Englishman reading as if he is following his finger along the words on a page, then you are listening to a clone of my voice.
That is one of the latest and rather beautiful things from a company I’ve been using for a couple of years now.
It first started when I revamped this blog, and really, really wanted to do an audio version of every blog post. I had a good search round, and this one was a mix of the best audio and they had the cleanest WordPress integration. it delivered everything I wanted, so I paid a couple of hundred pounds to get the posh version.
Since then, I have been very happy with it. It offers a kind of fidelity and text to audio behaviour that I’ve never met before. Obviously very Artificial Intelligence driven and there are a lot of competitors in this market, but there’s a lot of good tech underneath it.
So we’ll split this review up into the experience and any pluses and minuses.
On the experience side, it’s obviously a very fast moving company. They are keeping themselves cutting edge by adding lots of new features constantly. The text to speech is absolutely phenomenal and more than I could have ever wanted.
Every time I am happy with their service, they bring out a new feature. Which offer enough value so that I’m willing to pay out the money to move up their pricing levels. Currently I’m on their studio Unlimited, which lets me do full conversions with my own voice. Very, very happy with it. And I couldn’t recommend it more.
They have a good website and nice integrations with other platforms (I first found them via a WordPress plugin search), the voices them selves run the full spectrum from stock generic voices all the way to custom clones of your own voice, obviously the pre done voices are far more polished
and sound so close to human that its only the fact they don’t auto adjust to your bad grammar and punctuation that gives them away.
The process of recording and cloning your own voice is an interesting one. and while Play H.T. make the process very easy there are some lessons learnt that I would give to anyone that are trying to clone their voice.
They get you to read out and record a great big chunk of your own text and upload it from which they clone your voice, however once you’ve done that it becomes quite obvious that you have different voices. I have a narration voice as if I was reading a story to somebody, Then I have my chatter voice when I’m talking to another human, or I am on a phone call.
So if I was to add advice, I would read out the type of source material that you are going to generate audio from in this case blog posts, and do a couple of full practice runs before you do your recording, Because your Ums, Ah’s and pauses get incorporated into your speech pattern.
1) Their customer service. I don’t know what they’re paying their customer service chat people, but it’s not enough. Genuine 24 7 service, I pestered them on New Year’s day at about nine in the morning and they answered within 30 seconds. Knowledgeable, consistent, helpful and with the power to make account changes at the financial level.
This has meant that every bad item I have hit they have fixed within 24 hours.
2) You can keep making your voice better by adding extra data to it. obviously this only applies to their clone service and currently you can’t append more audio to an existing voice but you can delete the existing one and reupload it with more data for free.
1) Their User Interface consistency. The company on the whole feels very driven by it speech engine, which to be fair is completely as you want it to be, that is their big differential and is the core of their business.
However, I get the slight feeling that they will release a new part to the voice engine or new feature update, and then give the UI people like 30 seconds to adapt to it and jam it out to live. A bit more Quality Assurance guys! and consistency between features would help. things like the WordPress is massively behind the website.
That all needs a bit of polish. It has the feeling of either a very young company or a company where the marketing people have got a death grip on the schedule.
2) Invoicing. Their Invoicing is mad. Again, I think this is driven by the fast movement of their internal processes. They double invoice, they loose track of plans and a feature or 2 will be half accessible.
And while their customer service is absolutely fabulous, has the power to address these things and does so at high speed, it is something that makes you go “Why?”
1) Long Paragraphs. While it has a hard limit of 250 words in a paragraph, there is also a soft limit of about 4 Lines, if you go over that it seems to have to glue them together and it near always repeats a few words in the middle.
2) Haunted recordings. Sometimes the Engine has a little moment, like it is listening to a noise in the background, it goes silent. stopping talking while it listens to ghostly voices. then it restarts where it left off.
3) Acronyms. It REALLY hates acronyms, its fine with the common ones like countries and weights, but give it a computer one or a website and it will do a variety of strange things which can be different each time,
I’ve tried spaces, full stops, spaces AND full stops, speech marks everything to get them to behave, but it really sulks with them which is strange, as the previous version of the editor without the voice cloning had no problem at all.
Conclusion
For the text to speech situation generally, services like this will mean that all but the very best audio narrators should be genuinely worried. But for the rest of us this latest revolution really starts to deliver on the promise of computer speech. You still have to put an awful lot of effort into getting a very good human sounding voice, but now at a level that is totally practical to use.
More specifically on Play H.T. They are constantly evolving and improving, and I am very satisfied with them as a platform. Once they get over their slight growing pains and get their consistency sorted they will be perfect.
Other than the audio quality and features already mentioned above.[↩]
They actually give you a little bit of conflicting information about how much audio they need, so parts of the website say, minimum 10 minutes and then one to two hours for best results, other places say minimum 30 minutes for best results[↩]
Niggles are issues that the site currently has that either they don’t have in the standard offering or that I am sure they will fix so these may be out of date by the time you read them[↩]
Old Fashioned weblogs are surprisingly rare nowadays. Even sites that are classed as blogs are very often just highly targeted to a specific audience with the long term goal to make money or to prove a point of some description.
When I started a blog, way back in 2004, it was genuinely a dear diary type of thing mainly about fencing but grew and changed with what I was doing and was a huge part of what I did in the IBM Lotusphere days.
Since then lots of people have trailed off and stopped writing, but I’ve still kept it up. And even though it’s had times when it was on hiatus, it still brings value to me and the reason for this slightly self indulgent post is to explain why.
I am not a content creator and like everybody I go to the internet as my first port of call for most things. but how do I feed what I have learnt in the real world back? this blog is that. So that things I learn I can share and maybe help someone else.
I keep control of my content. Social media has to a large extent been the downfall of the traditional blog, why go to this effort when there are massive platforms that will curate and promote your content for you. And most people I know have used a single social media platform as their main personal or professional promotional area. I think this is an incredibly short sighted and naïve path, As we’ve discovered with things like Twitter, they can go in a new direction and suddenly you’re left on a poisonous platform, also companies like LinkedIn are known for dumping old content that you have spent ages on as they try a new thing, I don’t want to loose that effort and history on someone else’s whim.
Background, as a person with a professional presence this is an easy place for people to find me. Clients or individuals who want to see what kind of person I am, and it can back up assertions I might make on my suitability.
I always love people’s podcast lists, as its a good way of getting new listens, so here are my recommended ones for 2024.
Current Active Podcasts:
When It hits the fan – One of the most amazing reveals on what is ACTUALLY going on in the world and media, every episode is full of “So THAT is why!!” , moments.
Last Week in AI – A solid, non-hysterical way of keeping up to date with the world of Artificial Intelligence
Politics Weekly UK / Politics Weekly America – A 2 for 1 here, while the Guardian is one of the most left-leaning of the UK newspapers, the coverage is well done, and I find the left newspapers are far more balanced and less ranty than the right-wing ones, and there are often right-wing guests to give balance.
The Valentyne Heresy – I know RPG podcasts are all the rage, but this one is a good one and not embarrassing to listen too.
Archived Podcasts, but worth listening to:
The Brand Plan – A podcast on marketing by an old flatmate, a surprisingly fascinating listen, and I await their second season.
The Magnus Archives – One of the greatest original content stories done in podcast form. If you have not listened, then please do, especially if you live in London, UK.
Well, this has been a really odd work year. The first part of this year wasn’t massively productive from a value of delivery point of view, although good from a personnel management stand point, with new lessons on how to deal with high stress and how to minimise impact to your team caused by changes in other areas, but from a pure enjoyment point of view not one of the greatest, and I’ve been always one of the very, lucky people who have always enjoyed their work. Thankfully its an old lesson, to always value the joy in your work first so I decided that, going back to full time consulting, rather than a permanent role was where the fun was, I DID however, make a huge ton of good friends, and as a number of them left after me the network of good people I now know has grown.
The latter half of this year has been far more enjoyable. It’s been challenging, but fun. It has been filled with enthusiastic techs rather than political battles. It has been totally delivery orientated. It’s just been everything I’ve always loved In a job, and people that know me have noted that I am back to my old bounce, The new set of clients I have been working with have also squared the circle for me in improving my CV.
The next part is I have for my day to day work moved even further into the management role. Away from technical and that is simply down to discovering that it was the place I could do the most good. As a tech, there is a limit to what I can fix, but as a manager that represents the interest of delivery and technical people and tries to actually help them reach their goals, that’s a big thing and the sheer volume of good, if you can call it that, that such a view point can provide in a corporate environment is huge. It’s been very, very rewarding. And I’m going to be a little bit egotistical and say It’s actually made a few people’s lives and work better, and who could ask for more.
But if I look at the three basic areas that I normally review:
Management: I am still treating this as a growth thing, and something that I have noted with quite a few of my management colleagues at various different clients over the years. Managers do not treat their personal growth in the same way as techs and business people treat theirs. They think in terms of their growth, rising through an organisation, getting more powerful, but not in terms of their skill set, and I’m finding that that is a really wonderful thing to try for, can you be a better manager, not simply a more powerful manager, so that is where I’m going at the moment. its my main focus which means I’m not looking at getting any formal certifications as you would if this was a business or a technical position.
The old management certifications aren’t worth what they used to be and Agile while it is nearly the only game in town nowadays. It is being treated more as a religion than a faith. I’ll expand on this more on a separate blog post. To me Agile has been for the last 20 odd years merely the simplest way of getting a lot of deliveries done while keeping track of them. Now as always these things have grown into far more of a religion. There are people with silly titles. There’s people who do silly ceremonies that don’t actually bring you closer to your delivery and just chew up time and frustrate your team. I found that going a little bit old school on this and trying to just focus on things that help deliver is making my management style work much better. I’m getting good feedback from both the people I work with and the people I work for. one of this years challenges will be to try and better explain it as a process.
Technical: As always, I might do management as a role but what I am is a Tech, and I still fiddle with it constantly. The two technical areas I’m mainly working on both last year and the coming year is making sure that my Azure is as good as my AWS. and ensuring that I keep up to date on Salesforce. And while you might be expecting me to do AI, I am not learning it in the normal way. The large language model side. Everyone’s getting excited about that, but I like to dig under the covers, and particularly how vector databases are working and growing and how they work in terms of security are my big things that I have both been learning and am continuing to learn. thank fully I have a smaller client that has had me working on a challenging little problem on this very subject, and this is hitting all my geek buttons.
Business: My business knowledge is growing at the same pace as management. Because my new set of clients, even though they’re in the same field as my old ones, they are dealing with wildly different things. Unfortunately, I haven’t made as much progress as I wanted with my CII certification. That is still on my hard to do list and it’s getting more and more important this year.
