Text to Speech Blooper

Text to speech voice readers have been around for decades. In addition to several commercial offerings, there are free online options such as the ones from NaturalReader, TTSReader, and many others.

My daughter’s school has been doing a fantastic job of keeping parents and families informed about everything going on, including the school’s reopening plan amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also been sensitive to the fact that there is a large Spanish-speaking population, so it provides certain communications in both English and Spanish. Here is an example of one such message:

In addition to emails, our school also provides the option to receive communication via text messages and phone calls. Certain phone calls are recorded by school staff, and others are generated by text to speech software. Today I received a phone call that was clearly generated by text to speech software.

CLICK HERE TO PLAY

Did you struggle as much as I did to understand it? After a few seconds, I realized that they had mistakenly applied English text to speech against Spanish text. Totally honest mistake, but it made me chuckle because it reminded me of how certain students would pronounce words in my introductory Spanish class in junior high school.

I truly do appreciate the tremendous effort that my daughter’s school has put into communicating and over-communicating to families this year. The level of effort from school staff and volunteers is one constant amidst the craziness and unpredictability of this calendar year.

Goodbye Adobe Flash

Adobe will hammer the final nail in the coffin for Flash on December 31, 2020. As announced by Adobe in July 2017, open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured and are viable alternatives for web content (translation: Adobe admitted that Flash technology is becoming obsolete).

I suspect that Adobe’s announcement was a bitter pill for them to swallow because there was a lot of bickering between Apple and Adobe about the role of Flash on the web, especially because Flash is not well suited to touch-based gestures on mobile devices, and Apple had experienced tremendous success with the iPhone (released in 2007) and had recently released the iPad (on April 3, 2010). This in part led to Apple’s release of its famous “Thoughts on Flash” open letter on April 29, 2010 which is no longer available on Apple’s website, but fortunately I saved it and posted it here. As the late Steve Jobs summarized:

“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

As stated in its announcement, Adobe will not provide security updates for Flash Player after the end-of-life date, and they recommend that all users uninstall Flash Player before the end of 2020. Today I received the notification to uninstall Flash from my 2007 iMac running Mac OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan).

I have not yet received the notification on my 2012 iMac or 2016 MacBook Pro but expect to see the notifications on those machines in the near future. If you are not prompted to uninstall Flash, you can do so manually. Simply follow the instructions that Adobe provides for Mac and Windows. Thank you Adobe for giving us the opportunity to enjoy many years of interactive Flash-based web content and for serving as a springboard to bigger and better things.

Saving Zoom Chat Transcripts

If you’re one of the millions of people who have scheduled or joined a conference call with Zoom, you may have engaged with other attendees in the chat window. Sometimes people share their email addresses or links to websites. However, the chat window is not as interactive as it could be. For example, clicking on an email addresses does not invoke your default email client, and clicking on a link does not invoke your default web browser. Instead, nothing happens. Furthermore, you cannot copy/paste the contents of the chat window. These are features that I hope Zoom will introduce in a future update. But here we are, stuck in the present with a first world problem.

As a workaround, you can manually re-type the information. However, this has 2 main limitations. The first limitation is obviously that you can make a typo or possibly mis-read the information and faithfully re-type what you mis-read. The second limitation is that you must re-type the information before the call ends. As soon as the meeting host ends the call, your session ends, and the chat window disappears. I’ve addressed this second limitation by taking a screenshot of the chat window and then taking my time later on to re-type the information. This is particularly necessary when someone posts a link to Google Docs, Google Sheet, or Google Slides toward the end of a call—those URLs have lengthy alphanumeric strings that are cumbersome to transcribe.

But enough of this silliness with workarounds! I needed to level up my Zoom skills and found that there are 2 ways for you to save a transcript of the chat window. The first is to click on the ellipsis (3 dots) in the chat window. From there, click the “Save Chat” option.

Voila! Your chat will be saved to a plain text (.txt) file in your default location. If you want to change the default save location, go to Preferences > Recording and select the file path under the “Store my recordings at:” option.

The second way of saving your chat transcript is to configure Zoom to do it automatically after every call. To do this, go to https://zoom.us and sign in to your account. Navigate to Settings > In Meeting (Basic) and toggle the “Auto saving chats” option to enable or disable auto-saving your chats. With auto-save enabled, your chat transcript will appear in your default location after the meeting ends.

There are a couple of nuances that are worth mentioning. First, I like how the chat transcripts are saved in a folder that is named by year, month, day, and time so that the transcripts and recordings are saved in chronological order. Second, if nothing was entered in the chat during your call, then no file or folder will be auto-generated. For more information, visit Saving in-meeting chat in the Zoom Help Center.

Characteristics of Exposure Notification Apps

 I’ve previously written about manual contact tracing as well as digital contact tracing using exposure notification apps as methods that we can use to help curb the COVID-19 pandemic. There are advantages and disadvantages of different kinds of exposure notification apps, some of which I’ve discussed. However, an article in Annals of Internal Medicine provides a more comprehensive overview of the characteristics of Bluetooth-based, GPS-based, and WiFi-based exposure notification apps. The following table summarizes the key points:

As the authors note, contact tracing is one of many pieces of the COVID-19 puzzle. It supplements but does not replace the need for hygiene (e.g., covering coughs/sneezes, washing hands), social distancing, effective treatments, widespread testing, and eventually safe and effective vaccines. That being said, uptake of exposure notification apps is currently very low as you can see from the “Uptake” row in the table above. How much better do you think we can do nationwide?

BallotTrax Notifications

I recently wrote about how you can vote by mail, and one of the resources that I mentioned was BallotTrax. I signed up online and received 2 helpful email notifications. The first notification came on October 4:

This is a message from Los Angeles. Your ballot for the upcoming 2020 General Election has been mailed to you. Normal delivery time is 5-7 business days.

If you are a military or overseas voter, your ballot should have already been transmitted to you.

Questions? Call (800) 815-2666 or email votebymail@rrcc.lacounty.gov.

Visit https://lavote.net for election information.

The second notification came today:

This is a message from Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters. Your ballot for the 2020 General Election was received and will be counted. Thank you for voting!

Share that you voted!

I am happy that BallotTrax is available and will probably use it for future elections. If you haven’t already signed up, and if you haven’t already voted, you might still be able to get a confirmation that your ballot has been counted for the 2020 election.

Crowdsourcing Mask Compliance

When you’re out in public, do you wear a mask, and do you notice when others don’t? If so, you’re not alone. In fact, the folks from Regenstrief Institute have announced the release of MaskCount, a mobile app that enables the public to crowdsource data related to mask wearing in public. Users simply report counts of people wearing masks and not wearing masks simply by tapping or swiping in the app.

The thought behind this app is that when combined with other data, researchers can analyze the effects of local public health policies and study the association between mask-wearing and various COVID-19 trends. Regenstrief plans to make the data publicly available via privacy-preserving dashboards. While location data will be captured by the app, the only information displayed to the public will be aggregated data.

MaskCount is available for both iOS and Android devices. There is no cost to download or use the app, and it is available in 15 languages. Are you planning to report mask compliance?

LAUSD COVID-19 Testing Program

Schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have started the 2020-2021 academic year with 100% virtual learning. It is unknown when schools will reopen their doors, but LAUSD has been planning for when that day will come. Most experts believe that we won’t have a safe and effective vaccine that is delivered to enough people to end the pandemic until mid- to late-2021 or even later. Meanwhile, the reopening of schools and businesses will depend on the 3 T’s: treatments, testing, and (contact) tracing. Treatments are left to health professionals. LAUSD is planning on addressing testing and contact tracing as announced by Superintendent Austin Beutner on August 16, 2020.

COVID-19 testing has been provided initially to staff who are working in schools, as well as their children who have been provided childcare by LAUSD. Testing will then be offered to all staff and students over time. There will be initial testing of all students to establish a baseline, followed by additional testing that will be “based on epidemiological modeling.”

According to a letter to the school community sent October 5, “Students whose families choose for them to remain in online instruction and staff who are not working at schools will not be part of the testing program once students return to school facilities. The students and staff at schools will continue to be part of a program with periodic testing based on advice from our science partners.” So it sounds like there will be an optional transitional phase of returning students to the classroom.

The details regarding contact tracing are not as clear. From what I gather, students will be required to use a Daily Pass App that was built by Microsoft and customized for LAUSD. Daily Pass will be used to admit students to campus and will also include a daily health check along with notifications for when it’s time to get a COVID-19 test. I don’t know if Daily Pass will include all the same features as SafePass and other exposure notification apps, but I can see why they would want to integrate contact tracing into a district-wide app that has features specific to LAUSD needs.

According to the October 5 letter, “After an initial, negative test and as long as an individual shows no symptoms, the App will admit that person to a school campus or district facility. If the test is positive or symptoms appear, then the individual will be referred to the appropriate health authorities for care. Read the entirety of the October 5 letter here:

Additional information is provided on the LAUSD COVID-19 Testing Program website. Finally, this article discusses the backstory behind Austin Beutner’s bold plan to ramp up its testing where LAUSD is the first and only customer of SummerBio, the company that was awarded a $48.9 million contract to provide testing for LAUSD.

It will be interesting to see how this program unfolds, as it will be the first of its kind for a school district of this size (LAUSD is the 2nd largest school district in the US). I commend LAUSD for undertaking such an aggressive and complex initiative to ensure the safe return of students to classroom-based learning.