- [Richard] Many DAISY libraries use the DAISY Online Delivery protocol. And we also know that many DAISY libraries are really excited by the possibility of voice assistance, Amazon Alexa, and the Google Assistant, as well. Maybe there's a magic marriage that can happen that will mean that folk who use the DAISY Online Delivery protocol could make use of those speakers. A couple of libraries in Northern Europe and in Australia have been working with one of the Dasiy friends to develop and pilot such a service. So let's hear from Daniel Ainasoja from Pratsam, who indeed is the one who's been developing this service about voice assistance and DAISY Online. - [Daniel] Hello, everyone. And welcome to my presentation of Pratsam Reader Voice, and hope you are all good out there. So this presentation will be about a new service called Pratsam Reader Voice that enables end-users to connect to DAISY Online bookshelves with a voice assistant such as the Google Assistant. So I will tell you a bit about Pratsam, who we are, and a bit about voice assistant, and Pratsam Reader Voice, the features of the service, and some field trials that we've done, and what might be good to think about when designing, and launching a service, and finally, about the roadmap. So Pratsam is a software company founded in 2005 in Finland and Pratsam is a Swedish word for talkative, and we've been developing and delivering systems for the production online distribution and playback of accessible books and newspapers since the beginning. And the end-users are all print disabled. Most of them visually impaired. So we offer automated production and online distribution systems in the cloud. And we also offer accessible apps for smartphones, tablets, computers, web browsers. And we have over 25,000 online end-users on our system at Celia. It's the national library for accessibility literature and publishing in Finland. And where you had some international projects since 2015. So what is the assistance? What is, what can they do? You might have been using Siri or even the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa. So it's possible to set timers, make phone calls, check the weather or play games, listen to music, news services, podcasts, control devices, smartphone devices, and try out the Pratsam Reader Voice public demo. So it's already available. And if you tell the assistant, "Okay, Google, talk to accessible book service," it will open the demo. And there is a DAISY sample book available to read. So the Google Assistant is available in smart speakers, displays, smartphones, televisions, headphones, wristwatches, and all kinds of devices today, over 1 billion devices and supporting many languages and more languages are added continuously by Google. So the service, it enables organisations to provide end-users with accessible books, magazines, and newspapers. Today, we support the Google Assistant platform, but we are developing support for Amazon Alexa this very moment. And it's supports the DAISY 2.02 specification and the DAISY Online Delivery protocol. So the service is a kind of layer in between the voice assistant and the library system, and it provides the end-user interaction and also communicates via the DAISY Online Delivery protocol to the library service. But the audio is streamed directly from the DAISY Online service to the device. So we don't store any audio in our service. And the features of the service. It's of course hands-free operation. Only a voice user interface. And it's possible, then, to list the books in a bookshelf and select them and resume from the previous read position. It's possible to adjust the playback speed and volume, navigate by headings and pages in a book, and to add, list, select and delete bookmarks. And there is also a help section available if the user gets lost. So we've been developing this for over two years, and we did some field trials already in 2019, and they are continuing. And some comments we got from the end-users was that there needs to be a possibility to change the speed of the reading speed when listening to a book. And some user would have wanted to search for articles by headline, and also to choose the section in the newspaper by the name of the section. And we also realised that good guidance is very important. So the end-user won't get lost when using the service. So it's very valuable to do field trials and get, and improve the service based on the response. So what we learned. A great service would be designed to reflect the content properties. The DAISY book often has structure. So we think that it's important that the service supports this structure in a logical way, and it might be good to consider to offer different services or service designs, depending on the content. If it's fiction, textbooks, newspapers, and magazines. So for instance, you might even have separate services for each magazines. So it's easy for the end-user to open a newspaper just by saying, "Talk to 'New York Times'", and you would get the latest newspaper. So, but this is something that the organisation can decide. And other things that this could think about when designing Pratsam Reader Voice service is the branding, the name of the service. It should be something that is easy to pronounce and that the assistant understands. And then of course, the authentication process. They need to log in somehow to the DAISY Online. And we have a solution for this. And end-user support and training is of course needed. But this service is kind of a plug and play, because it can use the existing DAISY Online services, other libraries. And this means that the existing workflows and systems can be used to manage users and content. And we've done some testing with several library systems today, and we got it, got that books to play, and some systems did not support the bookmarks synchronisation. So we need to customise it somehow if these features are required, but we've seen that there are small differences between services, but it's not a problem to adjust the service to work with different systems. So how can an organisation get going and launch a service? We would suggest that to start off with some testing, set up a test service, which might require a week or two, and this is something we've been doing for free, then run a pilot with real end-users. And this might require two to four months, depending on resources. And this would require a one-time branding cost to do this phase. And a third phase would be to go full scale. Launch a service to all users. Might require a month or two to make it ready. And then, there will be licencing costs based on the number of end-users. And finally, about the roadmap for Pratsam Reader Voice. So we are now building support for Amazon Alexa. A feature to search the library catalogue would be nice, to add and delete content in the bookshelf, and also to support table of contents navigation in a DAISY book, and support more accessible book formats such as EPUB, and also to support more languages. But this, of course, depends on Google and Amazon development. Okay, thank you very much. You can find more information on the pratsam.com, or send me an e-mail at daniel@pratsam.com. Thank you very much.