Following is a presentation of TFNN. Wall Street Money Hour with your host, Peter Bruno. Call 1-877-927-6648 to talk with Peter Live. Now, Peter Bruno. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Wall Street Money Hour. This is your host, Peter Bruno. And this is an inaugural program that's starting today. And I'm happy to be here, and I'm happy to join the extreme group of other TV and hosts. It's important to note at the very beginning that all the hosts are using their own form of research analysis and research which may be different from all others. However, it is possible that we can all come up with the same answer or the same target format at the same time. My research is original and proprietary, and I've been using it for 50 years. And to my knowledge, I don't know of anyone that is using anything similar to what I've been using. So that makes us unique in this particular program. What I like to do at the outset, if those of you have not heard my interview or our interview with Tom on Friday introducing this program, is just to review a little bit how we came up with the name Cycle Analysis and how we came up with this type of research that we do. The key here is going back to a teenager when there used to be a weatherman on, I think, NBC television. I remember him because he had a handlebar mustache. And he would say on the night before the weekend that the temperature the following day would be sunny 90 degrees. And I would be there Saturday morning with my towel ready to go to the beach. And suddenly it would be thunderstorms. And I would say to myself, how can these people be so wrong? And these meteorologists had a very, very bad record back at that time. And I'm going back maybe 50 years. And I said, I know they're using patterns and using that, cold fronts and hot fronts and weather information to make their forecast. But if I can take the Dow Jones Industrial Average and all the stocks, and that's the oldest indicator that we had at that time and put it into a computerized format where I can determine the directional movement up or down of stocks within the Dow, then I would be able to be on the right side of the market when I'm investing and out of the market when I don't want to invest.  And over the years, with the help of technology, we really were able to fight to all work, as well as these meteorologists that are unbelievable the way they are able to forecast weather patterns and hurricanes and when the sun's coming out or when it's going to rain. And I had mentioned in the interview that I had been in a car with my wife and my wife would be looking at her iPhone under a weather channel or weather app. And she said, we better get home because it's going to thunder shower in 15 minutes. And sure enough, no sooner do we get home, the skies open up and there's a thunder shower. So these meteorologists have done very, very well over these years with the help of technology. And so do we. Now we're able to determine number one, what is the market climate in an individual stock or an index or an industry as to whether the market or index or stock are in an uptrend or a downtrend. And we're able to use different time frames which tell us whether the long term is up or the long term is down. And even to fine tune it to a point if you wanted to trade that particular stock or index. Now the key I believe is to identify firsthand if the long term cycle is up or down. And if the long term cycle is up, well, it kind of gives you some extra confidence that the market should or the index or that stock should continue to move up. However, if the long term is down, then it's lose frightening that you know that the market or stock would be moving down over a period of time. Now I like to describe it as an uptrend having a three step up and two steps down and a downtrend, the market has three steps down and two steps up. That means that even though it's a long term down in the particular stock or index, it doesn't mean that you're not going to have the two steps up which you're able to trade and make money. And after all the objective of this program and every program hosted on TFNN is to make money for the viewers and the people watching. So the key here is what's the market climate at this particular point and the market climate at this point is down. The long-term cycles are down. That doesn't mean we can't have rallies within a down market where you can make money using the shorter term cycles. However, in the long term, the markets are going to continue to move down and it's gonna be kind of frightening and risk adverse. Ideally, if you can identify if markets are moving up, then at least you know that even if you made a mistake, the markets come to bail you out. So if markets are moving up, you can't fall asleep because following an up-trend market would be two steps down. And the two steps down are going to either eliminate your profits or give you an opportunity to buy at lower prices. So our strategy in a down-moving market, and I have to tell you this, that all these indices and most of these leading stocks that have been leading the market over the last couple of years are in a downtrend. Okay, so the key is to develop a strategy where you can buy good quality stocks at low prices rather than pay high. There's two ways of making money in the market. Some people, they like to buy high in the hope of selling higher. Other people, like to myself included, like to buy low and sell high. So my strategy is based on looking at our short-term cycles that are oversold looking for an opportunity to buy at lower prices when stocks or indices are oversold. Now, the idea here, if you can see my screen, I think you may have seen my screen, I have the S&P 500, which is based on a Bruno oscillator. And a Bruno oscillator, if you can see, going back to March, had a bottom in the market. And then it moved up basically to the 4,200 and it came down to 4,100 and then back up to 4,400. We'll be right back after this break. Currencies, commodities and bond markets are as important as ever right now with how they're driving the volatility in equity markets across the globe, which is why it's a great time to try out Teddy Kegstad's Tiger Forex report. Teddy Kegstad breaks down the Forex markets every Monday using his 30 plus years of experience as a trading veteran of futures, Forex, stocks and options. Teddy releases his weekly Tiger Forex report every Monday morning with coverage of all the major currency pairs, including the dollar index, the Euro dollar, pound dollar, dollar Swiss, dollar Yen, as well as many more. And he also has weekly coverage of the crude oil market and the 30 year T-bonds as they both influence Forex markets tremendously. When you sign up for the Tiger Forex report, you also gain instant access to Teddy's 60 minute webinar archive. He just hosted Forex strategies and fundamentals. What is behind the Tiger Forex report? For all the details and to start your 30 day Tiger Forex report subscription today, visit the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN, educating investors. The gold report. As a precious metal, gold is still king. It continues to hold the most effective safe haven and hedging properties across the global major trading hubs of the London OTC market, the US futures market and the Shanghai Gold Exchange. The gold report. Tom O'Brien publishes his weekly gold report every Monday morning for subscribers consisting of coverage of the XAU, HUI, GDX, the dollar, bonds, the South African Rand, as well as 25 different mining equities with specific buy sell recommendations. The gold report. New subscribers get a 30 day money back guarantee so you have nothing to risk. Subscribe to Tom O'Brien's gold report newsletter now at TFNN.com. Are you ready to take your trading to the next level? Introducing Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter Market Insights, your key to successful active trading. Tom O'Brien, renowned for his expertise in the financial markets, has designed Market Insights to be your daily guide to profitable trades. Tom publishes his daily Market Insights newsletter every market day before the market open, along with updates when warranted. Stay ahead of the game with Tom's real-time analysis and trade recommendations delivered straight to your inbox.  Ready to join the ranks of successful traders? Head over to TFNN.com and subscribe to Market Insights today. Don't miss out on this opportunity to supercharge your trading results. Market Insights comes with a 30 day money back guarantee for all new subscribers so you have nothing to risk. Don't miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your trading game. Head over to TFNN.com right now to join the thousands of traders who have already experienced the power of Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter Market Insights firsthand. TFNN, educating investors. To the Wall Street Money Hour, this is your host Peter Bruno. And as we were stating and showing before the break was the Bruno oscillator and the Bruno oscillator, which is a daily oscillator, is showing us that back in May of 2023, the S&P was at 4,100. And then after some updating and breakouts, it moved up to as high as 4,455 and then it reached the highest point of 4,575. Now at that point, the Bruno oscillator reached resistance because the channel shows resistance and support based on the particular index. So at that resistance level, we would sell or recommend a sale. And sure enough, it went from there down to a low here of 4,352. And then from that low of 4,352, it hit support and then support moved up to 4,542 and then that was it. And then it started to move down after it reached the resistance and now it is where we are today. Now, you're going to find it's very difficult to believe for the right because in every textbook that I've ever looked at or every professional trader or investor that was giving advice about the overall markets, the number one rule that I never heard anyone tell it differently except myself is that never add to a losing position. And that's a true statement. Never add to a losing position because you never know if that low is the low of that particular stock or if it's going to go all the way down. Now, the beauty of this oscillator is that it tends to hold the support that it moves down to. So therefore it's not necessary to use a stock order because you're not concerned about the stock falling out of bed and having a massive loss. If we go back to where we were here, okay, the stock for the S&P 500 reached support but down to support from the previous high, okay? And then it moved up to resistance, down to support up to resistance, down to support and up to resistance, down to support. Well, we're at support now and you can see that the support level that we created is pretty much going to hold the low of the markets. It's not going to be exactly that it's can't go down another half a point to another point. However, it's pretty unlikely that it's going to just fall out of bed and go all the way down without the support holding. So that's a great weapon to have on your side of trading or investing. Now here we were looking at the S&P 500. Let's take a look at Apple. Well, Apple looks the same way. I kept on moving up, okay, through a major support level which was as 195 up here, okay? And then suddenly it fell out of bed and it came all the way down to support of 171. You can see support held and after support held and moved back up to resistance of 189 and then came all the way back down to where we are now of support, okay? So basically, even though the long-term cycle for Apple is down along with all these other stocks that I've listed on this page, you can still make money by trading Apple when the cycles start to move up. Now, in addition to this daily cycle, we have shorter-term cycles and the shorter-term cycles will tell us exactly how far down Apple could go. In this particular case, we see that Apple can get down to 167. So here if we're at 170.63, we have another three points to go down. So what we would be doing in the Wall Street Money Letter is that we have a chart or mechanical that tells you whether the stock is, well, let me show you up here. See if I can bring it over to my screen. Hopefully you can see that. We have the symbol, the long-term cycle when this particular case is down, okay? Minimum upside target doesn't do anything for us here. The minimum downside target will give us a price here, 21.52. The short-term oversold support level would be 21. That's where you would try to place your orders. And then the short-term overbought, which is not the case here, would be less blank. And then we have a trading strategy. And a trading strategy, what I like to do is knowing that these numbers and that we're able to calculate the target prices for the day, we're able to say, okay, here are three possible prices that the stock can move down to. So rather than just place an order to buy at one price, we like to place an order to buy at three different prices. And in this particular example, we're suggesting that you buy one third of your order at 21.33, another third at 21 even, and another trade at 20.77. So doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get all three orders, but pretty much the 21.33 would be the top order that most likely you would at least get a minimum of that. Now, the greatest advantage that we all have as traders and lower investors is that most brokerage firms are not charging any commission. So you don't have to own 100 shares of stock. You can buy 10 shares of stock at one price, 10 shares of stock at another price, 10 shares of stock at another price. And suddenly you have 30 shares of stock if they're all executed on that day. Excuse me, the key is that on this program, because we're in an overall down-trending market for all indices and stocks is to do a dollar-cost averaging approach to investing and trading in order to build a portfolio. Okay, so in other words, if we place an order to buy XYZ and we are executed in those three price limits, the following day, as long as the security is oversold, we create new price targets for the following day. And I can assure you that no price targets for today are going to be the same price targets for tomorrow. They all change with the four o'clock, the market crosses, and the overnight trading begins for those stocks to trade overnight. And then the morning at night 30, start over again, and those prices would be different. We'll be right back. TFNN has just launched their new trading room, the Tiger Zen, hosted at Discord. TFNN has been educating traders for more than 20 years with live programming hosted by a variety of professional traders during market hours. And now they are expanding their reach with the Tiger's Den, available to all Tigers and Tigresses for just $1 for the year. There's no catch or added costs when you join our community of traders. In the Tiger's Den, you can look over the shoulders of Tom O'Brien and the other TFNN hosts while they analyze charts during their live Tiger TV programs and join an interactive trading community with hundreds of members exchanging ideas, interact with other Tigers and Tigresses as they share trading ideas, news analysis and discuss the market action all trading day, even at night and on the weekends. The Tiger's Den at Discord is accessible on mobile or tablets as well. So it's always at your reach. To sign up today and become a part of this educational community of traders, just visit the front page of TFNN.com. Sharpening your skills as an investor is like getting better at playing a musical instrument. You have to practice, sure, but you also need excellent instruction from experts. At TFNN, you'll get advice and guidance from the authority and technical market analysis, and it's not just dry tedious text either. TFNN airs live financial content streamed live on TFNN.com and TFNN's YouTube channel with Tiger TV, live every market day from 8.30 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. Eastern. For free, each host is an experienced trader and gives their take on the market while taking calls and questions live from around the world. From the moment the market opens until the closing bell sounds, Tiger TV has eight different shows with expert hosts to help you make the right moves with your money. Watch online at TFNN.com or on TFNN's YouTube channel and become the investor you were born to be, TFNN, educating investors. Are you ready to take your trading to the next level? Introducing Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter, Market Insights, your key to successful active trading. Tom O'Brien, renowned for his expertise in the financial markets, has designed Market Insights to be your daily guide to profitable trades. 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To Wall Street Money Hour, I'm your host, Peter Bruno, and I hope in my discussion prior to the break, I'm trying to explain the strategy that I believe we should use within an overall down-trending market and how to make money. Of course, this isn't that the whole name of the game, aren't we all trying to make money? And for 21 years, I was a money manager owning an investment advisory firm and I was doing a radio program called Managing Your Money as well here in South Florida on money talk radials. So the point is that it's not the excitement of placing the trade and losing money, it's the excitement of placing the trade and making money. So that's what we're trying to do and that's what we're trying to share with you within this Wall Street Money Hour program. Now, the key here, let's go through some of these stocks that we have, these oscillators, we mentioned Apple, okay, Adobe, okay, it's down toward support, Amazon and all these stocks, by the way, are at support levels, Best Buy at support, Lowe's at support, Dow Jones at support, Microsoft at support, just started to move up from there, Netflix at support, Deque's moving up from their key support, the S&P 500 moving up from their support and Visa moving up from support. Now, this kind of gives us an overview of what should we expect next? What should we expect next is some kind of rally coming off of this terrible down market that we've been having, it was up earlier overnight and then suddenly when Chairman Powell started speaking, kind of fell apart. So the point is, is that how do we invest in this type of dangerous market? Well, as I say, this is a daily chart but we have smaller timeframe charts and in these smaller timeframe charts, we have other support and resistance levels as well. So I mentioned that Apple had support at 167, 168, okay, Adobe has support at, currently it's at 505 has support at 501. Amazon has support at 121 when it's now 128. So ideally when placing buy orders, buy limited orders to buy these stocks from today, we want to place the buy orders as close to the shorter term support level that we have. Now, as we continue with this program and get a little bit more sophisticated from the basis concept that I'm trying to explain, at this point and on this inaugural program, depending on the sophistication of the investor, you will be able to, for example, if we said that Amazon has support here at the 122, you'll be able to sell a put option for a month from now, let's say at 122. So if we're correct, and if the cycle is moving up, has the put option that was sold at a 122 strike price goes to the 125 or the 127, the put option is going to decrease, allowing you to buy the put back at a lower price than at what was sold. So there's a lot of sophisticated ways to use our analysis as well, but what I'm trying to do is not knowing the TFNN audience. You can have sophisticated traders, as we see in the Discord, or you could have people that are just listening or watching, trying to learn the best way to invest without losing their money and so on. So I'm not sure I'm trying to appeal to both the novice investor and the sophisticated investor. Right now, I'm suggesting to review that no matter what the investor is and whether you're investing for yourself or investing for your grandchildren's account or your daughter's account or your wife's account or your IRA account or some other conservative account that you're not willing to lose money in that particular account, I'm suggesting a strategy of atoning the water and a dollar-cost averaging strategy of these stocks that I've just mentioned here on this chart that we show that are oversold and should have the next step of moving up. Now, ideally, what you need to do is not just take a guess and buy at whatever the current prices. The idea is to be able to understand and know what the short-term support levels are. And if you know what the short-term support levels are, that's when you can place your orders, as we suggested, three orders to buy at one price to buy at another price and to buy at another price. This is like going fishing, okay? We don't know for sure if we're going to execute all three orders that we're suggesting. We just may execute one order by 2133 and not a $21 even or 2077. But as I said, whatever happened today wipes us to stay clean because tomorrow is a new day and new target numbers would be configured based on our style of analysis. So if we purchase one unit today, tomorrow we can place another order for another two or three units. And at one point, we're going to build a portfolio and when the cycles start to move up, we'll be making money on the portfolio that we hold. Now, depending on the type of investor you are, if you're a new investor or a longer-term investor trying to build a portfolio, then you will follow the recommendations that we are suggesting. But if we happen to... I think the... in one of our action alerts that we send out based on the letter was to buy NVIDIA at a certain price. And when the NVIDIA moves up, five, six, seven points, a sophisticated trader might say, hey, you know what? I own a hundred shares. I own a thousand shares. I'm going to take my profit and go somewhere else. That's okay. It depends on the type of investor you are. It depends on the type of trader you are. It depends on your knowledge of the securities business. And we're giving you this information so that you can take advantage of it regardless of the background and sophistication that you have. It will be right back after this look. Sharpening your skills as an investor is like getting better at playing a musical instrument. You have to practice, sure, but you also need excellent instruction from experts. At TFNN, you'll get advice and guidance from the authority and technical market analysis. And it's not just dry, tedious text either. 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Back to Wall Street Money Hour, this is your host Peter Bruno. And years ago, when I was doing the Managing Money Radio program for 21 years on the South Florida Money Talk radio station, as a matter of fact, along with Tom Bryan. Tom Bryan was on the same station. That's how we knew each other. I remember my dad pointing out to me that you should tell your listening audience the stocks that you're buying because they would want to know what you like rather than you mentioning other stocks or answering their questions regarding the stocks that they're interested in. And that is fairly true because a stock is good enough for me to buy and certainly should be good enough for the listening audience to buy, at least to my best effort of helping them making money. So that idea created the Wall Street Money Letter, which is a newsletter that we write. It's not up on TFNN yet, but every Monday morning we'll be writing a market commentary based on where we think the market is going and what our forecast would be for where the market should be headed. In addition to the market commentary, we'll be giving a similar that I showed before a mechanical showing the symbols of the stocks that we're interested in, what this long-term cycle is, the minimum upside target, the minimum downside target, short-term over so, short-term over what, and the trading strategy and what we recommend for the subscriber at that particular time. Now, a newsletter be written and published Monday morning before the market opens, and what we would do over the weekend is go through our analysis looking for the similar stocks that we've posted here and telling you exactly if any of these stocks that are listed here generated a buy signal and if so, what the price targets are that we suggest that you buy. Now, in addition to that, we have what's called an action alert. And an action alert is let's say I'm looking at the overall market on Monday morning or Monday mid-morning and I see a stock that I think it's ready to move up. Could be one of these stocks. It could be some other stock. Well, if I decide to buy it within the Wall Street money leather tracking account, I will immediately notify TFNN of what I'm doing. Here's a buy alert, an action alert to buy XYZ stock at this price that I purchased that and any additional information. Now, the subscriber has three choices. Choice number one, they can pick up the phone and call their broker and follow me and buy the stock at the price or around the same price that I had suggested. Or option number two is to say, you know what, I passed. I own enough of Apple. I own enough of Adobe. I know I own enough of Amazon. I don't need to own more shares. Fine. Or option number three is that they can ignore it and decide to track how well they would have performed if they did follow my advice. So that's the options that they have. Now, because I sent out an action alert to subscribers, obligated to tell the subscribers when that recommendation is sold, we lose a draw. Okay, so whatever I decide to sell if I'm selling at a loss, I would have to notify the subscriber that we sold at a loss. If I'm selling at a gain, or I decide to take profits, I would have to tell everyone I'm selling at this particular price. The same action alert that you got to buy or received to buy, you would receive on the sell side of that recommendation. So what could be fair to that? And that's the Wall Street money letter that would be up on the TFNN pretty soon. So on this strategy that we discussed today just to review, I have suggested that because we're in an overall down market for the major indices and most of the leading stocks within these indices, that I suggest they tone the water in order to build a portfolio within some of these key issues. You know, wouldn't it be a terrible thing if 20, 25 years ago, your grandchildren said to you, hey, grandpa, did you ever buy Amazon? Did you ever buy Netflix? Did you ever buy Microsoft? And if you can't answer an astounding yes, they'll be wondering what's wrong with you. Did you think that these stocks were going to go out of favor or out of business? So here's an opportunity to build a portfolio for a new type of investor with a tone of water approach adding to investments on a dollar-cost averaging basis. And on a dollar-cost averaging basis, hopefully in time if our cycles are correct, you would be able to have a position that is well above the average purchase price that was traded at that time. Now, depending on the sophistication of the subscriber or the investor, you would then know what the cycles are. You would then know the best way of taking advantage of it. And by the way, I gave an example earlier about selling put options. Selling put options are the best way to use our overall cycle analysis. Because you're receiving premium, it's very conservative. Worst-case scenario is that you are assigned to stock or you own the stock. For example, if you said, you know, I really love Apple, so I really want to buy Apple or I want Apple to be in my portfolio. So if you look at Apple and it's in the recommendation, we suggest that Apple can get down to $168 from the current value of 172. If you were willing to own Apple at 168, well, then what's the problem? You sell a put for some time in the future at the price of 168. Worst-case scenario, it goes down to 168 or at that time. Worst-case, you bought the stock at 168. You wanted to buy Apple anyway. So what was wrong with buying it at the price that you were willing to buy that in the first place? So now you were assigned to stock, you own Apple at 168. And therefore, you want to sell it. The problem with selling put options, however, as a warning, is that you have to have enough money in your account. If you are assigned to stock, that's a bad part of that. If you want to have this break. If you're looking for potential trading setups in the stock market, then Rocket Equities & Options report is a newsletter you should try. Tommy O'Brien delivers options and equity trades when the markets present them using a combination of fundamentals and technicals. Sign up for Rocket Equities & Options report guaranteed so you have nothing to risk. For all the details and to start your subscription today, visit the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN, educating investors. You might think that if you want to be successful at trading in the stock market, you're going to need a crystal ball. After all, it's impossible to predict the future, right? Like any endeavor in life, before you decide it's impossible, get some advice from the experts. You might find that it's not so impossible after all. For daily market overviews that give you direction on the key indices, selective stocks and commodities, subscribe to the opening call newsletter at TFNN.com. The opening call newsletter is written by Basil Chapman, creator of the trading methodology known as the Chapman Wave. The Chapman Wave up-down sequence gives you an edge in identifying price turns, finding the peaks and valleys in stock prices.  First-time subscribers also get a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied, let us know and you'll get a full refund within 30 days of signing up. TFNN.com. Educating investors. Everything in the universe is governed by the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical principle is responsible for everything from the most aesthetically pleasing artwork to patterns in the stock market. To stay on top of stock patterns in the range of, sign up for the Fibonacci 24-7 newsletter at TFNN.com. When you subscribe, you'll get a weekly report from Veteran Day Trader Larry Pesavento on stocks you need to pay attention to and you can trust Larry's analysis. After all, he's got 45 years experience as a day trader. Larry will also provide daily charts, videos, and data on the key markets that he's tracking. Expect notifications from Larry on market movement you need to act on at any time. First-time subscribers also get a 30-day money back guarantee. If you're not satisfied, let us know and you'll get a full refund within 30 days of signing up. Subscribe to the Fibonacci 24-7 newsletter today. TFNN.com. Educating investors. Get your own market hours. The Tiger Stand. Available to all tigers and tigeresses for just $1 for the year. There's no catch or added costs when you join our Community of Traders. Sign up today and become a part of this educational community of traders. Just visit the front page of TFNN.com. Next on TFNN. I'm going to show you what you sold the put option for. And the disadvantage of that is that you have to have enough money in your account in the event you were assigned that particular stock. So if you only sold one put on Apple, you would need $1,730 in the account in the event that you were assigned that 100 shares of stock, 1,000 shares of stock, and a lot more money. So the fact is that that's the worst-case scenario. The best-case scenario is that our cycle analysis is correct and the stock starts moving up. And the sale price of that put option goes down, which means you can then cover your sale at a buy price which is lower than the sale price. You don't have to wait to the expiration date of the option whether it be the end of October, November, December, whatever, because making 3, 4, 5 $100, you're making 20, 30, 40, 50% on your money. You can mail it and take your money down for that. Now, if you notice, I did mention selling put options. I did not mention anything about call options. And the reason for that is that 90% of the people that buy call options never get a chance to exercise their call option and they lose money. So no matter how enthusiastic people are, you'll wind up not achieving the success that you want. Okay, well thank you very much for joining me today and we'll see you tomorrow, same time.


Thanks Jamie. Hi everyone. Thanks for showing up. It's a Friday afternoon and I know you're all hanging for a drink. I certainly am, so thank you for your patience. In case you don't know me or if you've forgotten, my name is Tessa and I'm a product designer at Service New South Wales. The purpose of today's presentation is to show you some of the cool stuff that we're doing in government. We'll be talking specifically about the Service New South Wales website and what we're doing to deliver great online experiences for our customers and our Drupal users. I'm the artist. I'll be discussing how we use UX research and design to meet the needs of our customers and agile ways of working that allow us to respond quickly to usability improvements. Christine, hands up Christine. She's in our front row. She's our builder. She'll talk more about the front end features that enhance usability as well as our CMS features that deliver a better publishing experience for our content editors. And Gibran, hands up Gibran. He's our technologist. He'll end the presentation with a discussion on how the platform upgrade has increased reliability and performance as well as our contribution back to the Drupal community. So to kick off, I'll tell you a bit about Service New South Wales and what we do. We give people and businesses easy access to government services online, over the phone or in person at one of our service centre locations. Examples of a government service or a transaction as we call them is renewing a driver licence or applying for a birth certificate, as you can see in these examples. We launched in 2013 with just one service centre in Kayama. We now have over 180 locations across New South Wales, which includes service centres and digital stores. And we're recently listed in the top 10 best places to work in Australia. This is the first time a government agency has been nominated, so that's a very big win for us. And if you're wanting, we're currently recruiting, so please check out Seek or come and see me after this presentation. So can I just get a show of hands here who has used the Service New South Wales website? A few of us. Great result. Just some background info, our website was built on Drupal 7 and launched in 2013 with 426 transactions. As you can see on the right, it now has over 3,000 pages with more than 2 million users a month, which makes it the most visited government digital touch point for people in New South Wales. And we're excited. We have a variety of content pages, which includes transactions, campaigns, guides and news. So what you're looking at here is our very first website. And yes, we rocked the blue gradients. I actually heard one of our staff say that this looked like a cartoon, and now I can't help but think of smurfs. Moving on, the website did a great job at the time, but there was room for improvement, particularly around usability and performance due to an aging and highly customized CMS. Some of those usability issues included search, which had a frightening amount of quick links to transactions. This was problematic because it assumed that users knew what they were looking for from the start. And it was not easy to navigate the results either. In fact, our frontline staff found Google more accurate than our internal search, which was particularly embarrassing in scenarios where they would have to jump out of our site onto Google in front of customers at service centres. There were also issues around verb-based categorization on the homepage. What I'm referring to here is pay or new replace. We found that users expect to see content under topics and not verbs, so this was very confusing to them. And it looked our content team into a bit of a structure that excluded verbs like transfer and submit. The information architecture was another pain point. It was hidden at the bottom of the homepage, so it was hard to find. And it had 15 categories with some pretty long-winded descriptions that made it hard to read for users. As you can see, good luck getting through that in 10 seconds, right? Transaction pages were also difficult to navigate. It followed this standard format where information was hidden under accordions. And when the accordions were expanded, users saw just an overwhelming amount of content. In fact, one of our front-line staff said, and this is a direct quote, it needs to be more user-friendly. We get a lot of complaints about it being too much information and not easy to navigate. In addition to these pain points, some of the broader issues that we faced included a rapid increase in digital services. Just to give you an idea, we have added over 800 transactions to our website since we first launched. Another challenge was that customers have different levels of digital skills, which I'll cover in a minute. And lastly, user expectations and behaviours have changed, in particular around mobile usage, which now accounts for about 60% of our traffic. And this corresponds to a recent Nielsen study, which suggests a whopping 15 million Australians prefer using their phone to access online content daily. So the project objectives at a high level were around improving the user experience by really focusing on the needs of the customers, upgrading the platform to Drupal 8 to improve performance and reliability, and sharing our content and code with other teams to drive consistent experiences across all digital products, not just the website. Here are our customer personas, a broad mix as you can see, and we always keep them in mind when we're designing. The horizontal axis refers to a customer's level of digital skills, which ranges from low to high. And the vertical axis refers to the variety of services that a customer does at Service New South Wales within a year. Again, this ranges from low to high. Now, I'd like to introduce you to two of our personas, Auto Allen and Personal Pam. Auto Allen is an example of our high digital user high variety customer. He likes speed and comfort when browsing the web. Typically, he scans the page and feels comfortable clicking around until he finds what he's looking for. At the other end of the scale is Personal Pam. She's an example of our low digital user, low variety customer. As her name suggests, she prefers doing most things in person. She doesn't spend much time on the internet, but if she has to do a transaction online, she'll typically read everything before proceeding to the next step. So once we identified our personas, we established a way of working that would really benefit those customer types. We stood up a diverse team of content designers, product designers and developers, which included previous and next developers, a big shout out to them. They've done a great job. And the way that we delivered the project was through user centered design processes, which meant validating our designs with customers like Auto Allen and Personal Pam. We worked in an agile environment to respond quickly to usability issues. If you don't know what agile is, please hit me up. After the presentation, I'll be at the bar. And we continuously iterate on the website based on customer feedback and analytics. So this slide shows you just how rigorous we were in our research and design. We ran a staff survey with 126 responses. We reviewed four different data sources, including Google Analytics, staff suggestions, customer feedback and a form that customers could submit what's wrong with the page. We ran five stakeholder workshops and we tested our designs with over 90 customers and over 90 staff. And the reason why we tested with staff is because they use the website to serve customers at both service centers and at call centers. And in addition to all of this, we did a content audit of 1200 transaction pages to help us determine the IA or the information architecture. So yes, we had our work cut out for us. And this is the end result. A clean minimal design that enhances usability. It's a fully responsive site that can be used on any device. And the design is WCAG 2.1 compliant so that it's accessible to all. And I absolutely love this quote from a customer. He said, there's not a load, an overload of information when you get to the page. And everything is laid out in a nice structured way. The most important stuff is at the top of the page. Correspondingly, here's a quote from one of our staff. This is quicker, it's less typing. The way you've changed your layout is more effective for our customers. So to hear that kind of feedback where we're improving lives makes me feel like we've done a great job. The new website also has a powerful search with auto suggest to support users with their queries from the start.  And here's a quote from one of our staff. The search bar is great and only keywords are needed. I love how it brings up what you're looking for before you click and go. Christine will talk a bit more about search in a minute. The website also has a new information architecture, which sits higher on the homepage to really showcase our broad offering. It has nine categories reduced from 15 to help users quickly find information. And we got rid of the verb based categories, which means a happy users and a happier content team. And finally, we have a cleaner transaction page with improved spacing and the removal of accordions to help scan ability. Interestingly, we took this design out for user testing. And some users thought there was less information in the new design, even though we hadn't reduced the copy. It's amazing what spacing can do. The design also includes in page links to help users like auto and navigate sections quickly. And a call to action button at the bottom of the page, which is always visible to users. And that's to help our staff as soon as follow through at any point down the page. Thanks, everyone. Now I'll hand over to Christine. Thanks, Tessa. I'm Christine, and I'm going to talk about some of our website features that were built to deliver a better and more intuitive digital experience for our customers. I'll start off with search. So, as Tessa mentioned earlier, our website is content intensive. We have over 3,000 pages, so it's imperative that we We have a search function within our site so that we can deliver better services and to help our users find information and services quickly and easily. And to help us understand the needs of our users and to find out which product worked best for us, we did some research. And we found out that customers would actually rather use search than menu links to navigate the site and that when it comes to search, they want the Google-like experience and design. So there are a number of search products available in the market. We looked at Algolia, Sojari, Elasticsearch, and Solar. In the end, we chose Sojari because it offers the features we're looking for out of the box so that means we didn't have to do a lot of customizations. We considered Elasticsearch but to find it hard to maintain and customize to meet our needs. So here are some of our search features. First is it uses machine learning technology, which means it is constantly changing and adapting to automatically improve search results based on what the users are searching for and their behavior, just like Google. We can add custom synonyms, up-weight and down-weight records through boost rules. And for seasonal content-like campaigns, we can pin them to the top of the relevant search results to maximize their exposure. This is a demo of the auto-suggest feature. So as the user types in the search term, a list of keywords will appear, suggestions. And clicking on one will take them to the results page. In terms of the design, we kept it minimal for better scanability. So we constantly review our search data to see what our users are searching for and to see whether they find it. On the average, we're getting 13,000 queries per day with a click-through rate of 77%. It's above average, so it's a good indication that the results we're showing them are relevant and it resonates with them. Next feature is our service center locator. This is the design from our old Drupal 7 site. It has a store-type filter which confused our users, so we got rid of it in our new design. The service center locator is actually one of the very first enhancements we did using Drupal 8 paired with React. The little red markers you see there are all the service centers across New South Wales. To date, there are over 180 locations. We use Google Maps APIs so the users can use the map to find a location or they can search by suburb or postcode. The result will show them the exact address of the service center as well as all the nearby alternate locations. We've included the opening and closing hours to help our customers plan their trips ahead. Coming on one of the service centers will take them to a dedicated page where they can see all the relevant information about the center and we've also included an enlarged map. Next feature is our global navigation and footer which provides an organization-wide navigation for a whole of service New South Wales. So our header and footer are embeddable technology agnostic widgets which means they can be implemented in other digital products without impacting the code. It's written in native JavaScript and it has no external dependency so it will not conflict with other JS libraries. This is how our header looks like before in our Drupal 7 site and this is our old footer. So this new design tested really well with our users. They were able to access and move to the key sections of the website from any page. So the global nav service center locator and search are three front-end features that improve the user experience of our customers but we don't stop there. We put as much effort into the user experience of our content editors and how do we make our content editors happy, simple, we make their UI easy to use. This is an example of our campaign template for active kids. It has a hero image navigation, somebody text and down below are some clickable image cards and this is how it's managed in the back end. So we've cleaned up the toolbar to only include formatting buttons that the editors will need. We've provided help text and form elements such as this one to specify the dimensions of the image to be uploaded, more help text for the navigation style and down below is where they can add the image card. Image card is actually one of the many reusable components we have in the site that the editors can use to build pages. Our editors also manage the messaging of planted and planned disruptions to our services and service center locations. This is an example of a planned disruption where we inform our customers that this service center will be temporarily closed on a certain date. And this is how it's managed in the back end. So they have form elements and form fields where they can enter all the relevant information about the outage. They can choose which page or pages the message will appear on and they can schedule when to publish or unpublish the page through the save and schedule button. So this is an example of a very simple form because for editors seeing a lot of options that do not relate to content editing is intimidating so we make it a point to always give them a streamlined, less complicated UI that is clearly designed for them. Our editors also utilize analytics to optimize the content of our website. We feed data into analytics using Google Tag Manager with data layer. This is especially useful when we have campaigns and we want to monitor their effectiveness. So the insights and data we gather from analytics as well as the feedback we get from staff and customers when we do our usability testing helps us to see what is working and most importantly what isn't. Knowing what isn't working helps us to fine-tune the website and enables us to make better decisions so that we can provide the best digital experience to our customers. That's it for me. I'll hand over to Gibran and he'll talk about our platform. Thank you, Christine. So to deliver an innovative customer experience, you need to have a stable platform and efficient website. That's why during the planning phase, we really emphasized on the status of core and contrib modules. We made sure that all the needed modules are available in Drupal 8. We asked the question like, do they have a stable release? Do they have a roadmap if they don't have a stable release? What is the core quality? Do they have the tests for the major functionalities? What is the status of the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8? What steps are required if module is moving from contrib to core? Is a contrib module compatible with upcoming Drupal release? Last but not the least, what is the status of patches? Not just in the contrib, but in core issue queue as well. And where ever we can help to make them committable in core or contrib. We knew from the beginning that delivering the site of this scale and importance should not be done in one go. So we planned to roll one feature at a time. To make sure we can achieve that, we needed to make sure we can run D7 and D8 alongside each other. That is where our Kubernetes-based hosting solution skipper helped us. Our Ops team built a routing solution which sits between CloudFront and Drupal to make sure that the request is routed to the proper Drupal site. For this to work, we had to make some backend and frontend changes, like enabling the CDN module to make sure we are serving the proper assets. As we were maintaining two Drupal sites and actively working on new features, we also needed to make sure we can keep them secure and perform operation and maintenance tasks. That is why we updated our Dev staging prod working flow to accommodate security releases and bug fixes. As you can see, we added a new test environment to make sure we can deploy the security and bug fixes without interrupting the development of the new feature. During the development phase, user experience was one of the most important thing for us. We wanted to make sure UI changes are not overwhelming for the end user. And they are still according to the new design. As we discussed in search, it is important. As we discussed, search is an important feature for us. On the website, we made sure we can show Drupal 8 pages in Drupal 7 site search results until Drupal 8 search is ready. That means content reader had to maintain a copy of D8 pages in D7. During the big feature release, we didn't want to interrupt the normal usage of the website. So we added a fallback and rollback strategy to our workflows so that we can tackle the situation if something goes wrong. For the better user experience and efficient page load time, it was important for us that we can keep the performance in check. And performance is an ongoing thing for us. And we improved a lot of our custom code based on the performance issues we faced on the website. And that applies to code and content as well. After the release, we slightly changed our approach. We kept working on new features. We also wanted to make sure we can keep improving the workflows for the content editors. We also wanted to keep our code, contrib, and custom code based up to date so that we are always ready for the latest security release and keep on paying the technical debt. For us, performance improvements are an ongoing process. To have an efficient website, we perform regular checkups and try to improve wherever we can. From the security point of view, we are constantly looking into improving our standards for the things like securing API endpoints by Drupal. Moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, we reduced the response time from 100 millisecond to 200 millisecond. That was the major game for us. But since the launch, we also improved our response time 60% to 70%. This includes backend and front end performance enhancement as well. One of the major things for us was contributing back to Drupal and Opera Source community. Service New South Wales is in top 10 contributor as a Drupal end user globally. We always write a code, a contrib ready code, so that if we be able to open source it, we should. That is why Service New South Wales is supporting organization for the modules like schedule transition, leak management system, and among others. As a part of continuous improvement, we also contributed to various Drupal core and Drupal patches, which we are using. As you can see, we have a long list of four-hour contributions. We are also part of Drupal 8.8 beta testing program to help community with the latest table release of Drupal 8. As our header and footer are embeddable, our front-end code is also available as NPM package for the internal teams and other agencies to use. And if you have attended Jack's session yesterday, he went into detail how we have done that. For the upcoming stuff, we'd like to improve implement personalization so that the end user can find the things easily. For this site, we use the media solution provided by core by Contrib. Media library will have a stable release with Drupal 8.8, and we want to start using core solution instead of Contrib. When this site was built, LayoutBuilder was still in development phase, so to create the flexible layouts, we relied on paragraphs. And now that LayoutBuilder is stable in core, we'd like to convert those layouts to use LayoutBuilder. We also would like to upgrade to Drupal 9 as soon as Contrib is ready. In conclusion, I just want to reiterate the fact that government is really doing some cool stuff, user research and user-centered design to meet the needs of customers, a agile way of working to respond quickly to usability for the usability improvements. Front-end features to improve usability, CMS features to deliver a better published experience, and platform upgrade and maintenance to increase the reliability and the performance for the customers, and also contributing back to the Drupal community and open source. And with that, I would like to thank you all and feel free to ask any questions, and I would also like to call my speakers, ghost speakers to stage, and Daniel and Santa as well, because they are our ops team and development team, no? Questions? No? Yeah.  Yeah, you cannot put a finger on one thing but because it was the last project. And we had many challenges. We have discussed along the way, like from the usability point of view, search and the home page improvements come to mind. From the back-end point of view, migration was the one like moving field collections to the paragraphs was a challenge for you. A big challenge for me was internally. So we're like within the organization, we were going through a digital transformation at the same time that we were delivering this project. So I guess to find an operational rhythm was a bit difficult because there were things happening in the peripheral which kind of impacted our team. And also within our team, the website team, we've got two different focuses. So we've got BAU and then we had to deliver this project as well. So trying to find a way, an agile way of working that kind of, yeah, that was efficient, took a lot of time actually. How about you, Christine? Yeah, for me, I just recently joined the team. So like doing the agile ways of working is challenging for me at first. But all the teams are supportive and really collaborative. So it worked really well at the end. Is there or was there any resistance within South New South Wales as to contributing back to the community and especially spending additional time on that, like once you've got it in the site, maintaining your patches and contributions? I think Gibran's the first person to answer that. Yeah, so at previous next, we worked with a lot of government agencies and we had worked with Transport New South Wales who has a global presence on Drupal.org as well. And that was the tipping point for Service New South Wales internal team to convince that if another agency can do it, Service New South Wales can do it as well. So given that example, we convinced our project manager and then there's a way to go. And we can see that we are now on top and globally as a end user of Drupal. So that's a good point and proves everything that contributing back to Drupal works. And this is more of a UX question. But now that the site is out there and the public is using it, what are your methods, ways of analyzing certain things that may not be working or can be improved? I know you mentioned like the feedback forms and maybe analytics, but is there anything else? Yeah, so we're continuously iterating based on just Google Analytics and a customer feedback form that you can find on several kind of pages or page types on the website. So we receive about, I think, 3,000 submissions a fortnight and we trawl through that. Sometimes it's not always related to the website but we do need to triage it and we need to find a better way of it. But we do have a business intelligence unit within the organization who we're trying to engage to help us with that because the site launched in June 2019. So we're still, I guess, yeah, trying to find a way that's efficient of analyzing that data because we're just getting, I guess, big volumes at the moment. Thank you. Just a question about the search implementation that you put in there. I don't know, Drupal seems to standardize around solar. I've worked with Elasticsearch myself and found myself have to make a lot of customizations and such with Elasticsearch. With going to another search format where there are existing modules, was there much work involved in that? Because it seems obvious it was the right choice for you that you put there like it had features that you just couldn't have but what were the consequences for implementation? So the most important thing for us was the machine learning because we wanted to make sure user can feel that they are looking for the right terms and the search results are what they are expecting. With Elasticsearch or solar implementation, there's so much you can do around that thing. And even some of the features you can control by the UI and we wanted the content editor team to have that experience so that they can boost whatever they want and without getting involved on the back and side of the search. So that offloaded a lot of our work from this ops team as well as from the development side of ours because now our search is totally decoupled from the Drupal and it's a React app. Which is working with the Sugari. So that is a win-win for everyone. Great presentation. I work for the Victorian government. I'm just interested in your service, New South Wales but then I saw you also had campaign templates. What sort of decision making process you go through in terms of what content goes onto this particular site? So we've got an embedded team, sorry content team of five within our kind of broader team and we work with SMEs to actually design that page. So they meet separately and they decide what kind of content it needs to live on the page and then our content designers I guess choose from any of those reusable kind of widgets to help create that page. So does that answer your question? Is there, I guess is there any sort of governance around like I'm assuming it's a campaign to do with a service like you're just about services, is that? Yeah, so we've got a number of campaigns live on the website such as Active Kids and Creative Kids, Cost of Living, Digital Driver License. And I guess, yeah, sorry I've forgotten the question. I was gonna come back to it but what was the question, sorry? I guess I'm just interested in sort of the governance the website and how you I guess keep its purpose, how you keep its purpose. Right, are you talking more kind of like broadly? So are you talking about like the purpose of a campaign and how we extend the duration of that or because we do a lot of marketing outside of, I guess, outside of our team and more toward the public. And that's done through I guess our marketing team which is it's separate to us. Yeah, does that answer your question? Sorry, great. I just said, just the name of the search service that you're using, I just missed that. Digital Driver License. Digital Drive. What are you asking, sorry? Sorry, so the search service that you're using? Search, yeah. Sojari. Sojari, thank you, sir. Yeah, so related to the front end, so you mentioned the search, it's a decouple. So you guys just, it's partially decouple website. So you guys just got some modules and yeah. No, so this is a proper Drupal website and the content is all managed in Drupal but there are certain parts which we have built using the React app like the locator showed by Christine is totally built on React app and the data provider for that is JSON API module. And we build that content, the landing page you have seen for the store page, it is a normal node page. And we extract that data using JSON API and serve as a direct app. Similarly, for the search, we are using third-party Sojari so we can interact with their backend and APIs using JSON, JS. So that's it. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how tightly integrated the website is with your CRM, like since it's such a transactional website, do you integrate with the organization CRM very tightly or is it hyping people off into it? How does that work? Yeah, so all of our CRM integration is linked through our website, Drupal website, but we are totally independent from that. The content managed by the website team is totally independent to whatever they have in the CRM. And they have some static pages which we are in talk of migrating to Drupal as well so that they can manage them. The next feature for us is section-based editorial user data workflows so that they can have their sections and build their own pages related to their transactions. So that's an upcoming feature, but that was just for connected readers. There was one in the front as well. Yeah, mom was kind of similar to the other question before about the decoupling of the search. Like, does that still let you search API to interact with the Sojari to index it and then when it's actually searching that's all just front-end JavaScript pulling in. Yeah, so Sojari is just indexing all the pages. We want on the website to be indexed and then we are using their APIs or using JS and showing the results. No, there's no, yeah, there's no communication between Drupal and Sojari. Just public rolling, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks to Tessa, Christine, and Jabra.


Welcome to this talk on speech technology for the MOOC, we are now looking at the second part of speech technology where we will focus on text to speech synthesis. So what will be discussed or the topics covered in this lecture are as follows, we will discuss what is text to speech synthesis, what are the challenges in implementing text to speech synthesis on a cell phone and we will also take a look at a couple of applications which are essentially in the agriculture domain. So we will talk about voice based agriculture information systems, a generic description of that and we will take a particular example of what we call as the digital market for the Indian farmer, okay. So we will start off just as we did in speech recognition by defining what are the broad objectives of text to speech synthesis for machines. So for that let us consider this diagram that we have here. So you noticed in speech recognition that it was a process of converting the speech signal to text or signal to simple transformation. Now text to speech synthesis essentially is exactly the opposite of speech recognition. So given the text you would want to synthesize the speech signal. So for that if you take a look at the diagram here, you have an application, now the application could be anything for example you are pulling information from a database or you are probably typing in some text or you have a document that you want to read out. So that is essentially converted to text. So either the information is available in the form of text or it needs to be converted to text. Some info coming from the application needs to be converted to text. Now this text is fed into the speech synthesis framework. Now the speech synthesis framework does some initial processing on the text. For example things it does one of the simple examples would be smoothing on text and then it will plug it in into a speech synthesizer which is the heart of the text to speech synthesizer. Now that speech synthesizer output is piped to the core audio system or the cell phone or the machine. Now using which you generate the required audio. Now this the broad objective of text to speech synthesis for machines is therefore to convert text to speech. Now let us look into a little bit detail as to what is text to speech synthesis. So the definition process of converting a given text in a specific language to human like speech. I like to stress on human like speech because typically the output of speech synthesizers even in the state of the art applications is not human like it is not you get this synthetically sounding signal. Now the synthesis can be done using two methods one is software based the other is hardware based. Initially when text to speech synthesis started they used to have this very fancy looking machines which used to use you know parts which would generate different sounds and therefore they would produce complex speech. But software type of speech synthesis is the most preferred. Now what are the broad components to text to speech synthesis. So it involves text analysis the first step would obviously be text analysis. So given the input text you would want to analyze for what language it is what is the construct of the sentence what is the continuity of the sentence where are the word boundaries etcetera. Following text analysis you typically do what is called as automatic phonotization. What you mean by automatic phonotization is given the text for example we took the example of a phrase called their car we split the their into three phonetic units. So obviously in text to speech synthesis also you would want to break down the given sentence into the most minimal parts which are phonetic units and therefore you need something that will do automatic phonotization breaking down the sentence into smallest phonetic units is automatic phonotization. Now apart from breaking it down now when you synthesize a sentence you also need to know what is the underlying grammar or what is the underlying dictionary and therefore that is a very important thing which we call as dictionary or rule based synthesis. Now what are the types what are the types of text to speech synthesis. So the first one is concatenative speech synthesis. So what you mean by concatenative speech synthesis as we discussed a sentence can be broken down into smaller phonetic units. So obviously we are looking at recording these small phonetic units and putting them all together in a sequence and playing them all. Now when I do this obviously I am going to get the same sentence that would have been produced by me but the only problem there is you have a very synthetically concatenated signal which needs some kind of smoothing. So that is the basic way of you have more advanced methods like unit selection you have got diphone based synthesis. Now what do you mean by diphone based synthesis is we took a look at individual phonetic units. Now if you combine two of these phonetic units you are actually creating a unit that is of a slightly larger duration. Now when unit sound units are of a larger duration they tend to produce smoother sounds than compared to sound unit that are very smaller in duration. So combine two phones it becomes a diphone and a diphone based text to speech synthesis system is something that does concatenation on the diphones. So you also have some technically more advanced schemes like formant based synthesis, articulatory based synthesis and you also have something called hidden Markov model based synthesis. There are more technically advanced schemes but they use some kind of signal processing to produce a better sound. Now what you can do with text to speech synthesis there are several things you can do with it. One of them is e-learning. So when I say e-learning text to speech synthesis is being widely used in learning languages these days. For example if I want to learn a new language I know what is the how the text looks like and I would like to listen to the text. Now text to speech synthesis allow me to interactively learn a new language. It essentially also tells me how a particular word is produced. It is pretty interesting in that sense that you do not know how I know I do produce a word or a sentence I speak a sentence but I am not doing it in the way a native speaker would do. So if I have a text to speech synthesis either it essentially trains me to speak the language in the way the native speakers do. Fine this is one of the applications. So you have screen readers I think most of you are used to something called Amazon Kindle these days. So you have a text to speech synthesis incorporated into Kindle which instead of reading you can probably listen. Now this will help people who are you know specially able and not able to read things. You have audiobooks you have ATM banking where the banking machine will tell you what you did. You have got call centers and you have got interactive kiosks where you can actually get information. We will take an example of a campus directory information system. So for example you are in a university campus and you want to get information on reaching a particular place. So you ask where am I and machine will probably tell you at which location you are and if you want to go to a particular location name the location or speak the location it will give you the routing to that particular location. Fine so let us look a little bit more detail not very technical but a broad detailed diagram of text to speech synthesis. So if you can take a look at this figure let us take this very simple example where someone is keying text into his cell phone. So I want to keying text into a cell phone and I want to listen to that. So I keying text the first block if you can see is text analysis. So what the text analysis does is it analyzes the text for various things and it actually creates an utterance composed of words. One of the simple ways of looking at it is given a center that breaks it down into words. Now the words are broken down into phonetic units. Now once these are done there are several things that need to be done. The first one or the most important part is something called linguistic analysis. You do analysis on the language in which the text was piped to the system. So the three main things in linguistic analysis are facing intonation and duration. Duration is essentially trying to find out that particular unit is how long in a particular language. The second one is duration of course and the third one is called facing. Now the facing is how are these words or units let us take units in a particular word. How are these units faced so that the speech that you produce looks natural in that particular language. Now following these analysis you have utterance composed of phonemes or phonetic units which we have discussed. Now given the phonemes you pick the waveforms corresponding to that phonemes, concatenate them and what you get at the output is the synthesized speech signal. So for those of you are very technically savvy you can look at several open source tools. So you have got something called the festival speech synthesis system. It is kind of you know a software which you can download, install on your machine and pipe in your text and see how it sounds. So it has this basic structure where you can actually tell which you want a male or a female speaker speaking, you want uniform or diphone synthesis etc etc. One of the classic examples if you take a look at the picture you know who this person is and he uses text to speech synthesis. One of the classic examples where TTS is being used is this. I am sure you will be able to search and find out who this person if you are not sure. Now what are the popular commercial applications? I explained this already Siri and Google voice. Now how does text to speech synthesis play a role here? For example if I am querying a restaurant using Siri. Now of course the system pulls out the restaurant but it then also speaks out to you and says that you have to do this. You get essentially speech based information in the sense that probably you are driving a car and you would not want to see, take a look into the map, it will reproduce that as a speech signal, you could probably listen to it and drive to that particular location. So is the case with Google voice. Now what are the applications of speech synthesis in some, let me take an example of a particular application that we have developed at IIT Kanpur which uses text to speech synthesis. I like to stick to only agriculture information systems. So let us take this particular example of a cell phone based agriculture information system. What we do in this system is essentially the farmer is able to access the crop prices in his native language. Now he is not going to call into the system in this particular application but he is going to register one time using a cell phone. Say for example let us take a look at this slide. So he uses a cell phone, registers for say three crops and three markets that he wishes to have information using this kind of interface. So you have a profile created for the farmer, you can take a look at the right most screenshot. A profile is created from him, he says he wants information about three crops of three markets on these days and this application has got two modes of transmission. One is SMS, the other is voice calls. Now what we are interested from the, in the context of this topic is essentially the voice call part. So here we use the text to speech synthesis system. So how do you use it? You can see these three SMS's that we have generated, these are typical examples for those of you who do not understand the language these SMS are there in a language, in an Indian language Hindi. So let me read out the first SMS to the left most side. So what the SMS says essentially is on February 16th in a particular market called Hodel, the price of a particular crop ladies finger in this case was 2750 per quintal. So essentially if it was in English, we do have systems in English but this is for a particular language. Now the left most SMS that you see will be transmitted to the farmer but if he is not able to read the SMS, he also gets a voice call which essentially reads out this particular text as speech. Now for this purpose we use text to speech synthesis and most of the technology that I have described earlier is used in producing the speech signal from the text that I have shown here. So broadly what we have done in these lectures on speech technology is that we have discussed what is automatic speech recognition and what is text to speech synthesis. We have also discussed how this technology can be used in developing applications on the cell phone by taking two examples of socially relevant applications where a farmer can access agricultural commodity prices. So I hope this lecture has helped you. Thank you and if you have any questions you feel free to interact on the MOOC. Thank you.


Very excited. Yeah, very excited. Oh, yeah, I think we're ready. I think we're certainly ready. Joining the SpaceX demo to test He is a Marine Corps colonel and test pilot. He was selected as an astronaut in 2000 He piloted space shuttle endeavor and Atlantis for STS-135 the final space shuttle mission introducing NASA astronaut Doug Hurley It's a life-changing process in so many ways to fly into space. It's just overwhelming in some some respects Just the sensations the rumbling the shaking the acceleration When the engine shut off and you go from in the case of the shuttle you go from three Gs to zero Gs instantaneously and things start floating and I remember distinctly just thinking what just happened To see a rocket launch in person is It's a pretty emotional event. I remember the first time I saw a shuttle launch and it's just it was amazing And then when I saw a shuttle launch with my wife on it That is that is quite the emotional experience My name is Doug Hurley and I'm the spacecraft commander for the demo to mission to the International Space Station We are doing the first crewed flight for NASA and for SpaceX So this is the test flight to prove end-to-end from launch to docking to ISS operations and then entry descent and landing This will be the first time the dragon that crew on board and so there's a myriad of objectives we want to achieve for this mission SpaceX has been responsible for design and And and essentially making this vehicle what it is What the astronauts bring to the table is the crew vehicle interface What would work on orbit what might not work on orbit? What would definitely work? To be able to just have the entire integrated Team that's going to support us getting to and from space station Talking together working through the challenges that simulators typically throw at you It was really neat being part of it It's just been an incredible undertaking to See where we've come just in the last five years that Bob and I have been a part of this and to be you know shortly Flying to the International Space Station with the Crew Dragon It overwhelms you to think about how many people have in some way shape or form touched this program and this and this vehicle to get us to this point and You know we are the lucky ones that get to fly it But we certainly not for one second take for granted the amount of effort that so many other people had to put into this to make it successful For Doug personally he's he's worked so hard. I mean through his entire life To get to where we are right now as a test pilot This would be the dream to fly a new vehicle So it makes me so happy to see that he gets to be Part of this mission the spacecraft commander I'm just glad to see his hard work and his dream come true for that It's been a long road in a lot of ways for not only us But certainly for all the folks that work in the commercial crew program as well as SpaceX in our case Just working to get to this point It's been a huge amount of sacrifice and time away from home But the fruits of our labor are coming to fruition


So for the next talk on cows west stage we go into the fast track into the shorter talks and nevertheless this will be an interesting insight into something that has a lot of implications for transparency in systems and that's why the talk is called system transparency and It will be hold by Kai and Kai is a guy for Bochum and I give you the stage Hey so The 2020 is only a few days away and why we do not have flying cars or sexual robots We do live in a dystopian nightmare At a stop in nightmare where our computing is more and more controlled by unaccountable Silicon Valley companies This will there's no turning back the centralization of computing and data will only continue into the cloud because this makes things cheaper and Other losses to do things we couldn't do before 30 years ago, we were faced with a similar threat proprietary software staff at competition and prevented extension of software The result was the free software movement that had freed openness and freedom as it's called tenants Today we recognize that open and free software is the superior software development model Ironically free software won't help us this time because free software is one of the reasons why these cloud companies as a business model works So well What we need to do instead is to take one of the core ideas of free software transparency for the user and re-imagine that for the world of pass and sus So I'm Kai and I'm a hacker from Bochum and today I want to tell you about the system transparency project here And of course, nothing I will tell you here is just my idea I'm merely here to tell you about it and the system transparency project mostly grew out of the open source firmware community You could find here right behind the stage So system transparency has the goal of making the software running on a remote server That processes third-party data inspectable by that particular third party to do that we Proposed seven concepts The first one being that we need some kind of provisioning ritual because these servers are hard to get get a handle by right so we have this this Intransparent cloud and what we need to do is give every one of these servers and unique platform identity So we can decompose this cloud into individual servers, which allows us then to make specific statements about a specific service Second we need to make sure that the firmware the first and most privileged code that's executed on the machine is No to us and can't be changed by an attacker to do that We need to have some kind of integrity protection for the firmware running on the machine. Oh Sorry third Because we still have physical attackers We need to make sure that the machine is somehow temporary assistant or at least temporary evidence So we can see when at least attackers try to change the firmware and Thus try to attack the system Then we need some kind of platform attestation meaning that when before I connect to a machine I want to make sure that the software it runs and the identity It has is no to me before I send it my data, right? Otherwise I have to a problem that my data may be handled by a software I have no idea about and maybe is abused and and Because all of this platform attestation and also the protection Particularly protection of the firmware is done on the binaries We can only but we can only expect the source code We need to expect establish some strong link between the source code We were able to inspect and the binary that's actually handled by these platform attestation mechanisms Reproducible builds does exactly that right because I can recompile you for a source code I have expected and I will get the same binary that's running on the machine Then we need to limit the system access because even if we have integrity protected firmware And we know everything that has been executed as party boot We can still have in malicious Administrator locking into the system and changing things in ways. We can't control So we need to limit the system access. We need to have some kind of immutable infrastructure And lastly we need an transparency lock for all the software running on a particular server So we can monitor not only the current but as the past actions of platform Owners so we can audit them This is somehow like the certificate transparency mechanisms. We have with pki So sister transparency is not just a bunch of concepts. It's an actually broken implementation For that we use the super micro X 11 s HTF, which is a mid-range server board from super micro It has up to four cores 64 gigabits of RAM to 10 gigabit nicks and PCI express you can get these boards for less than thousand euros on the market and These can be used to use to do everything I will tell you now So in order to have some kind of unique platform identity We use and chip that's already sold it onto this main board called a TPM The TPM contains a unique certificate and a private key for that certificate That's inside this extra chip and can never leave it We can use that to use our unique platform identity and also it allows us to record what's booted What's executed as part of the boot chain? So the TPM has a special feature where it records the cryptographic checksum of all the code That's executed as part of the boot process We can then later read that out and verify that okay it booted exactly what we expected including the operating system Our X 11 runs open source firmware So we have a stack of core boot and Linux boot Cobalt doing the early initialization of the hardware and then later executing Linux boot Which boots into the operating system? We use the system bootloader based on this boot called ST boot to do all the Boot process especially fetching a new operating system from the network verifying it and then booting into it and Because we use coboot and coboot can be built reproducibly We can use that as our secure initial state we boot from We can everybody not only the platform owner can fetch the source code The cobo source code we run on the machine compile it and verify that this is the exact bit the bit exact copy of that What has been recorded by the TVM as part of the process? So we can make sure that this is exactly what a platform owner supposed to run on a machine Yeah, as I said, we have a special bootloader called ST boot that does does all the booting after the initial hardware setup We do in boot over HTTPS We then do a signature verification and some other stuff and then boot into the operating system We can boot pretty much any open source operating system So not only our firmware, but also our operating system can be built reproducibly In this case we built the kernel the initial RAM disk and the complete operating system To one blob that is always the bit exact copy of what everybody else has compiled We then sign that and the platform owner signs this hash signs the hash of these of this block We can also configure as T boot in a way that we require more than one signature So for example if the platform owner has five administrator Administrators as T boot can be configured in a way that at least three of them have has to assign the image before it's then booted Well, that's all nice The core idea of system transparency is that everybody else right users can verify what's running on the system and to do that we Also require the platform owner to request a new x5 for nine certificate for every operating system image He wants to deploy on a server fleet This certificate will contain the hash of the operating system image as part of the common name and because DCA that's issues the certificate is Working with the certificate transparency lock We have then the hash of the operating system image inside the append only certificate transparency lock That's run by Cloudflare and now we have an open append only and public Certificate transparency lock of all the current and past operating system images that have been deployed on a particular system and because ST boot before it boots checks that the Certificate transparency lock contains such a certificate. You can make sure that everything that boots on a particular server has been verified by us So in a nutshell this is transparency partitions the intransparent cloud of servers into a set of individual servers that have unique and Sorry as unique platform entities which makes allows us to do a specific statements about a specific service Right because we are still connecting to specific servers System transparency also Makes all the code running on a particular server visible to the users Which means that we force bad actors to lie about very specific things So for example if we have a VPN provider and they tell you well, we don't keep any locks In order to verify that you have to ask first figure out. Okay. What does keeping locks means? With system transparency, you can just get their operating system image get the source code and inspect the source code and decide whether you Consider their implementation of a VPN privacy respecting you and then compile that and verify that you get the exact bit exact copy Of that what has been inserted into certificate transparency lock and then can verify that. Okay. The thing I'm connecting to now Hasn't had that doesn't have any kind of vectors Now a malicious VPN provider has to lie about a very specific thing Which is this particular server with this particular unique ID runs this particular Operator system image with this particular hash Right and the more concrete these lies have to become that easier is to catch them No, sorry Also system transparency provides a public lock of everything that has been done also in the past by the operating system provider this means that we can Audit any provider more thoroughly than what we can do before right because we can check okay What happens before we had that we have used this machine? This also means that every platform owner every provider has to commit Publicly and irrevocably to every operation is the image before it is deployed on the machine Which means we as a concerned user can monitor the certificate transparency lock See for new operators and images and then verify them and when we decide okay. There are some changes. We don't like We can either stop using them their service or a lot of public and Lastly system transparency Works with open source firmware bootloaders and operating systems And this is important because this is the mechanism that actually allows us to inspect the source code and Summer closes the power gap between platform providers and platform users So what's the future? It is topia nightmare of 2020 We will hope to grow this ST boot and system transparency project into more major operators Opsource project, which means hopefully that the ST boots bootloader is maintained. We have better documentation. We have more features Also, we want to support more hardware. So currently we only we support everything that co boot and ST boot supports Which isn't that much? So we want to grow especially in the x86 market to support more servers that actually use in practice Speaking of practice We actually want to have in first transparent server running a production by the end of next year To prove to the public that this idea can actually work with real VPN providers, for example We also currently we're piggybacking on the certificate transparency effort We want to change change that and develop our own certificate transparency lock. For example this certificate It is sorry a software transparency lock can include then for example the source code of them of the thing we want to verify instead of just a pointer and Lastly currently we depending on the TPM which runs most of the time proprietary software We want to change that and figure out okay. How we can use open trust anchors For example the open Titan project or something based on risk 5 or something else and Lastly, we of course want to invite you to join our effort So in case you are interested in open source from there and the NDS T and System transparency project you may want to check us out We are just right behind the corner the open source firmware assembly is we are always happy to help you and Happy to help you with any hardware you have there, especially if it's about system transparency and So if you have a question now, you can either ask me or go to our website where we have all the documentation ready and if it was if you want just to talk to us in person you can go to the open source firmware assembly and Catch us there. Thank you Thank you Kai for a very concise talk. So we have a bit of time for questions. You can Heop and the microphones or we can see if there are Internet questions No internet questions Are there on-site questions? Come on anyway, if you Feel like oh, we have a question from the internet Yeah, the internet. Thanks you for the talk and wants to know what about mobile phones now. We can unlock bootloader, but Sorry, sorry, I don't understand it. Can you repeat it now? We can unlock bootloader But not to re-lock again. Sorry. I Yeah, should have read that earlier Give me a second. Okay, okay Maybe in the meantime You are queuing up. Okay. Yes Thank you for the great talk a very interesting project I've got one question one is Can you make sure you learn about any admin interaction with the cloud server in the end? Because that's one major concern. I would have if I run it on a right on a provider a hardware, right? So first you can inspect your practice damage, right? And you can when you see okay, there's an open SSH Server running, you know that the system isn't secure strictly secure, right because everybody can log in and change everything What we imagine is that either you forbid any SH axis whatsoever, which makes debugging a bit complicated Then you would have to for every change you want to do in the server You have to deploy new practices in which right this makes things very transparent, but as very annoying What we can imagine is that instead of dropping into bash for example You could have in restricted shell that drops the it's a it's on some script that it does allow you some things like restart a server Get some log output or whatever This of course only includes what the machine itself can do right if you're running in and in a hypervisor You have maybe other ways to look into the system This is the classic problem you have with trusted computing is you need to control everything or you need to say okay? My hypervisor or my hardware running on it is secure, right? This is this is an end problem We can't really solve Can I have a follow-up question? Yes consize question. Yes, sure I've from what you said I could imagine that there is a big company side interests specifically like from large infrastructure companies from Europe is that the case or We try to convince some of them But I mean if you if you go to Google or Amazon and tell them hey, I have this great idea about system transparency It's it's hard to get in there right but Yes, we know of some companies that do something similar right so the ideas we have here these seven concepts They existed somewhere else To write and this specific concepts were introduced to us by the Mova to VPN provider That they had these idea initially to somehow differentiate differentiate themselves from the other VPN providers Okay signal angel Could you repeat your internet question? Okay questions gone Is there another question from the microphone or? No Okay, I think that lands us perfectly at the end of the talk and As Kai said you can visit them at their assembly and you can connect with them in any way and Yeah, I'm looking forward to next year and yeah round of applause for him. Thank you