a blogging agency called Need Someone to Blog and that's how I'm able to talk to you about finding your client's voice today. So but before we get started on the topic I want to tell you about something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I went to dinner with a friend of mine who's a blogger you may have heard of her she's very well known in the word press space and also in the south her name is Kitty Lesby and because she's from this area I was asking her about some some geographical things I wanted to get to know what it was like in Raleigh because I'm from California and it's very different world right so in order to localize my talk I just started up a conversation said so what's the barbecue like in North Carolina and and he said well unless you like the vinegary kind there is you don't want to do the barbecue just trust the pork and she said because sometimes it's just catch up with meat on it and you never know what you're gonna get which I thought was a very interesting approach because all I'd heard was how great the barbecue was from Stephen Harvey who is somebody who works with my company and so I laughed I said okay tell me a little bit more about the south she said well it all depends on where you draw the mason-dixon line and then she informed me that Florida even though it's in the south is not part of the south so it was interesting to get that perspective and I was fascinated as she continued to tell stories about growing up here and sharing the differences between a been here and a come here and since I am a come here today it just it made me excited to be able to see what I was really gonna experience and I had to see it for myself so I want to thank y'all for coming out and being here to give me a chance to come to Raleigh and a reason to be here so so far everything's been very welcoming and I have to say that it's kind of been a life-changing experience for me to be here and it's added depth to my own voice because it's one more experience that I've had because I am a blogger and I know my friend Bridget here is sitting in this first row saying Jen don't say you're a blogger you're a writer and I am a writer I'm also a mom of eight kids I'm an agency owner I am many things I the founder of women who WP and so I've been very active in WordPress but really I am a blogger and I blog on a lot of people sites I blog on my own site and it's where my roots are and whether I'm a writer too or not I love to blog on websites how many of you are bloggers in this room okay and how many of you blog for your own website how many of you blog for other people's websites okay good there's a few of you so this is a business opportunity for those of you who don't it's something for you to realize is a service that you can provide I've been writing since I was four years old and I didn't really find my voice until I was 19 prior to that I was more of a technical writer my job was at a newspaper and I covered the police beat for them and I also covered the police beat for my college newspaper the daily 49er I knew how to organize my thoughts quickly how to ask questions and how to write in the inverted pair of pyramid and I thought I was pretty good at what I did but the year I turned 19 I was surprised because something happened at my newspaper that sort of changed my voice and changed how I looked at my writing one day in our editorial meeting someone said that they wanted to cover my hairdressers shop and they have a piece written on it and I immediately raised my hand and volunteered because my hairdresser was my friend I've been to their shop I tried all their services I thought this is going to be a shoe-in article it'll be easy for me to write and it will help bring my friends and business so I did my due diligence I made up my list of questions and I planned a day at the salon I even tried this flotation tank thing so that I could experience all of their services and I thought I had every detail in order so when I wrote my story and submitted it to my editor I was convinced I had dotted every eye and crossed every T well an hour later I got a call into the office and I was told that they had reviewed my article and that I needed to understand that there was a difference between a feature and a news story your story is lacking heart is what I was told turn it into something that someone wants to read and I was shocked I never had anybody say anything bad about my writing but really no no one had ever said anything bad and it happened that day and so I went back to my desk and I cried and a friend of mine who worked in the office was another writer she came over and she sat with me and I asked her for help we started rereading the story together and at first I didn't see it but she did she said tell me how you felt being there don't be afraid to let the laughter and the color and the true salon environment show through no one expects or wants it to be a sterile article you need to tell the story and with her encouragement I did my article was published on time even and it created quite a sensation in our local community because it brought my hairdresser into the forefront the people who went to the salon shared the story everywhere it really paved the way for me and for her to become better known in the community and it actually paved the way for me to become an editor of the newspaper and the quarterly magazine in time and I take it all back to that story because that's where I learned to write with heart and I kind of found my niche in or niche in later life because I started writing more of those kinds of reviews and more personality pieces because I found I had kind of a knack for it because they were easier for me to write and that's how I found my voice when I walked into my hotel room yesterday the first thing I noticed was a blanket folded neatly on the change lounge and it read make your point so I'm going to do exactly that and get to the reason why we're here today so we're going to be talking about blogging voice lessons or as the talk read creating content in your clients voice for those of you who write for others last October a client called me and said Jen I just read through some of the articles and blog posts that you wrote and I wanted to know where you found it and I explained that we didn't find those posts we didn't find them anywhere they were written just for him in his blog in his voice and he was impressed he'd hired bloggers in the past and they hadn't been able to create material that he felt reflected his voice he said they were all canned posts well canned posts are not the way to tell your client's story they do not work for showcasing a product and they definitely are not the answer when you want to capture your client's voice and vision you may be asking how a voice and vision can be related to blogging well a vision is a grand dream or a company's story broken into essential components a voice is a mechanism by which that story is told it can be written it can be performed it can be dance music even on stage a voice in this context can even be considered an art last fall I was in Austin Texas and I happened upon an outdoor art exhibit it was named Hope you can see it right here and some of the locals even referred to it as the graffiti wall I recognized it as a place where people would make their mark similar to finding their voice right in the context of the acronym Hope stands for helping other people everywhere people travel from all over the world to paint their names and contribute temporary art to this terraced wall they go to share their personal message and express their voice how many voices and messages do you think are expressed on this wall well I was there there are thousands and they keep being painted over and over so it continues to grow those messages of art are often replaced and sometimes the art that's there is modified so that the original art becomes unrecognizable someone who didn't understand the concept might view it as a wasted project however I didn't I grabbed a can of spray paint because they have several there and contributed a tiny bit of myself to the project because I didn't want to give up the opportunity to have a voice on this wall the Hope wall content that has been outsourced to content mills or unvetted writers often has similar drawbacks the subject isn't under oh wait that's not where I'm supposed to be hmm well that's okay okay but so I had my opportunity to contribute my voice and you can do that when you do when you write your own content but not everybody has that opportunity sometimes if something's outsourced it can it doesn't express the true vision of the company or the person who it's being written for and so that's when outsourced content can be a problem the subject isn't understood the meaning is lost because a writer can't connect to the topic it really can't adequately be described and so I'm going to put this in a context that can be understood but let's see incoming here I've seen some gorgeous scenery do you all agree yes right but I haven't seen the a passionately how do you say it appellation thank you trail I haven't seen it I can't describe it for you but I'm sure there who's seen it who's been there okay many of you could stand up here and tell me all about it and but I can tell you about the beauty of my drive from the Raleigh Durham Airport into town because all I saw were trees I even took a video send it to my friends in California look at this because it was beautiful and so I can adequately portray that so when I was in Austin Texas last October and there I tried barbecue right going back to my discussion with Kitty and I actually had three opportunities to try distinctly different barbecue the first time I was recommended go to a place called Vicks it was a home style family-owned storefront and the brisket was moist and nothing like the barbecue I'd had in California the following day I ventured to a place called Cooper's and Lano I tasted everything and was amazed at the flavor and I thought I discovered the best barbecue ever but on my final night in town I was able to sample brisket and ribs from a food truck called Kerlin and was blown away it understood that Austin had good barbecue this is I'm sure you do here maybe Kitty doesn't like it right but I knew that that was the that was what the area was known for and I was told it was better than California barbecue but until I had tried it for myself I had no idea what that meant and now as a blogger in California I know that writing about barbecue from a restaurant in Austin it's not something I would be capable of capturing because it's not something that I have in my repertoire so context is lost when someone doesn't understand the area or topic and by the way I'm happy to try some North Carolina barbecue if anybody has suggestions on places I should go okay so now we're gonna talk for a couple minutes about something that's unique to North care or NC State actually how many of you have been to the butterfly garden nobody do you guys know it's here there's a butterfly garden how cool is that okay well how many of you have ever looked at a butterfly and like studied the patterns on its wings okay we've got some people who are nature people super cool there's different patterns the colors each butterfly is unique and at this butterfly garden there are more than 50 species that are represented so it's a one of a kind experience every time you go there you're not going to see the same butterflies so bringing this back to WordPress just says every butterfly is unique that's what we need to see on the blogs on your websites we need to see unique original content that is representative of who you are or who your company is that you're writing for now blog posts typically have some commonality just like butterflies all have wings right so for instance there are many blog posts in the United States many of them are written in English but do they all sound the same no should they all sound the same no the tone or color of each is a reflection of the rider and it's called their voice so after reading several posts on the same blog you become familiar with the style whether it's casual or written with local slang or highly technical the and maybe it has odd bits and of humor added to the post these are the things that we start to recognize when we're capturing someone's voice it may be something completely different you may just notice that this writer always uses bullet points but usually there is something recognizable and sometimes you may come across a blog that seems really lackluster and like the content doesn't really relate that's usually when you can find a client because that means they're having somebody put that logging or do their blogging or create their website content that really doesn't understand how to capture a voice as I said before content is the context is lost when someone doesn't understand the topic or when they don't understand the feel of the company that they're representing and a share with you something that happened in in my writing career this is a scenario that I saw play out while working for a client that had hired he had outsourced his blogging to an unknown vendor in another country and he was trying to save money and thought that this would work but his scrutiny was very low because he knew he didn't really value the post and the posts weren't really I'll tell you in a second yeah sorry and they weren't really valued by the client so I was told to review the posts and make changes well I took a look at the first post and realized it was taking place in the Colorado mountains and the community was very excited about these cats there were cats that were coming to clean themselves on the mountain and that they they would play in the snow and I thought this is really strange because I've been skiing I've been to the snow I don't think I've ever seen a cat play in the snow other than maybe on YouTube have any of you ever experienced a cat playing in the snow all right so it's not a universal experience for sure so as I read through this piece that I was editing I realized it wasn't about cats or kittens at all it was about cats capital C capital a capital T the little tractors that's groom the snow and everyone was excited because ski season it was opening day and they were getting ready by grooming the snow and this is what this article was supposed to be about was announcing when Open Day was opening day was but the person who had written it obviously had no experience with mountain life had no idea what what they were talking about and this could have gone live on the person site had he not had me editing the post and so had the blogger taken even if they didn't live there if they had just taken a few minutes to Google cat all caps because they recognized that it wasn't the same as a kitten they probably would have found something relating to construction and then if they had put in cat plus skiing they might have made that connection I had life experience that helped me to make the connection pretty easily but not everybody does but when you don't you should put some research into the topic that you're writing about to make sure that you are on track so your context really does matter and your clients deserve better than that kind of a mix of wouldn't you agree and you do too if you're writing for your own content and you're trying to write something that maybe you don't fully understand make sure you understand it before you write about it because better content and better topics lead to a better voice so how do you develop and create that content for your client you first do it by listening to your client so if you're writing for somebody else you've got to really listen and you need to think about it any music fans out there okay could you tell the difference between a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen and Stevie Ray Vaughn yes okay I thought so okay are you able to recognize the difference between a Ford and a Toyota if you hear the motor okay and can you tell the difference of voices in your family different friends different family members without seeing them so our voices are very important I think sometimes we forget that and we just think we can go through the motions but it's it's not true we've got to capture that voice so listening helps you to recognize that uniqueness at my company we started we start the voicing process for our clients by interviewing the client we listen for unique phrases and we make small talk with them we ask about recent books they've read and magazines that they look at and websites they go to and why they like them we ask about their favorite places to visit locally because we want to have a community connection in their blog and this might give you insight into the type of content that resonates resonates with each client so you can ask them about their competition you can find out what their competitions writing about or get the websites and do your own research so that you understand some other topics that you might want to go into and you also should ask them ways that they want to stand out as a brand because what you're writing about if you're writing it in a unique and organized fashion and you're putting in your titles and your meta descriptions in your alt tags and all the things that you know you need to do to create good content if you're doing that it's going to be found in search engines and if it's found in search engines you want that company to be found for the right terms so it's super important to find out what their objective is and having you blog and you might want to ask them even for five adjectives that describe their brand so that you understand how they look at their company or ask them to describe a current client or a past client or the perfect client you can set the tone through creating the voice so there are several tones that we use at my company one is the professional voice and we use this when we write on more corporate type blogs because sometimes it's necessary to adopt a formal authoritative style this doesn't mean that we cut out personality it's not eliminated however we play it down a little bit I would say the key to keeping this style engaging while you're playing it down is to provide details sometimes a case study is the best way to do this because you're explaining what your company does you're explaining how it affects other users or you know vendors or whatever the case study may be about and that is is a great way to showcase your work so other people know what it is that you do another voice is the neighborly voice so this style is when we use on a lot of our community blogs it's more casual in tone and it can be used to really make it emotional connection a lot of lifestyle bloggers use this neighborly voice because it's a great way to showcase relatable events and your stories humorous voice is another one you've probably seen on websites this is one where if your client likes to joke a lot pay close attention because you might get a good understanding of what type of jokes they might would use in their content you might be able to just from your conversation pull one of those jokes and use it in their content and when someone one of their clients reads their blog they're gonna recognize that they're gonna see it so it's important to pay attention to those little cues and if you do have a client who would like this humorous voice one of the things that would be really good is to talk to them about hey if you hear of any good jokes if you have any funny stories tell them to me send this quick email you know all that you need is two sentences and you can pretty much flesh that out into a couple of paragraphs in a blog if you know your client well enough or at least it works for us another voice is the newsroom voice that's kind of that professional inverted pyramid style that I was talking about in the very beginning that I did at the newspaper I don't prefer that style anymore but you see it all the time on the internet and the reason why they used to do that is because with newspapers they used to cut from the bottom to fit the page and so the most important information had to be told first and then it went down to include more details as you went further on the page it can easily come across as stuffy or arrogant and so you have to be careful with this style because if it's done wrong it can be off-putting we don't want that we want engagement on those blogs but if you write for a news-based company this may be the style that they want and so if you are doing that then adding some community stories into that content can help to develop an authoritative voice even though it's newsy because it gives it shows that they know who their target audience is and it pulls people in the curious tentative voice okay so this might be a weak way to start a blog some people might say because blogging should be about sharing what you know so you should be coming from a place of authority however sometimes you want to write a piece that asks a question that says this is the way I think it is or is it because then you'll get comments you'll get people who engage in your topic because they might have a differing opinion it may reframe how you want to continue to write for that client even because you could use a support queue for instance and get some questions and ask the question rather than answering it so you can kind of flip everything around and you'll find that when you do that and you're curious about what the client wants or you're curious about how they solve this issue that you'll get a lot of shares on those type of posts so I don't use this a lot but with our clients every once in a while we do do a curious voice post just to kind of bring it all together so and the reason why we don't do it a lot is because it's it involves risk the client has to take a risk and be a little vulnerable when they're reaching out to their audience versus just saying this is how it is so these voices sum up the bulk of what we use for our client work however I'm sure you can think of more as professional bloggers we use these as guides and like I said before move between these voices and usually having a combination produces results that our clients love and it connects them with their audience it connects them with their community and it gives them credibility so I'd advise you all to do the same and and when when you're doing this when you're thinking about how you're going to approach this client blogging interaction and how what topics you're going to use sometimes it makes sense to review emails and so I'm gonna tell you like because sometimes you'll notice that your clients start a word with a sentence I have one client who starts like every third paragraph with the word and and you know capital and which is not something that's technically correct or common usage but it's the way she writes and so if we're writing her blog we're going to be starting every third paragraph or fourth paragraph with the capital and because we want to be in her voice we want the clients that she's emailing on a regular basis to see that it's her blog the questions you can ask is did your client often write in the third or first person they probably won't know but you can tell that by reading what they have written or by reading what they're writing in their emails two years ago I went on an extended trip to Europe and I worried that my email would go unanswered while I was gone I spent several months training my assistant on typical responses for our company and created a few templates and spent a few of the next few months reviewing what she was sending the clients to make sure that it was in my voice our company's voice really and we made adjustments and then two weeks before I was due to leave I noticed something I saw that just about every email used the words I appreciate you somewhere in it so weird like who says that right and that phrase just kept coming up so I hadn't spoken to my assistant about it and I just kept thinking about it and then I looked at emails that I was sending to my clients and I realized I totally overused this phrase I was saying I appreciate you or so appreciate you or some variation on it and almost every email I sent which is why my assistant had incorporated it I never use it anymore because like that freaked me out a little but I realized that even my voice could be learned so interesting point to note if you're starting your own business and you want to hire other writers to work with you so in order to involve your client you're gonna read your clients past writing everything from blog posts to emails and you're gonna look for those word patterns buzzwords that seem unique notice their length of sentences some people write really short sentences some people write all compound three line sentences you don't have to sacrifice your grammatical or graphical style necessarily in doing this but maybe you slowly bring your client into a line that is more uniform that people are used to reading when you notice something that seems a little odd but you want to make that a gradual change because the audience will gradually shift to understand that so if you have a client that makes references to growing up in the 80s what are you gonna put in their blog posts references to growing up in the 80s right if they mentioned locations all the time you're gonna want to mention locations because they might be very map based you want to use these things in your content and you also want to notice words that are not used so when if someone were to blog for me I never swear if somebody put something that was even close to a swear word in my blog post we would know it wasn't written by me right we would we would know that but there are other words like some people will never use the word actually or well there are just words that when you look at enough of someone's writing you realize that those words are missing because they could have replaced with them and they don't so I want you to make a note of that keep a little journal on each client or a little you know something in your computer as you track your client notes listen for those repeated phrases favorite quotes maybe you can ask them about and add these things into your post to add authenticity to them punctuation has trends as well often in social media I use to exclamation points when I'm excited about something so you can tell if a tweet has been written by me because I usually put two exclamation points I also am very much in favor of hashtags and so often my Twitter account will have four to six hashtags just because I'm having fun with it even though social media experts would tell me not to put that many in so though so professionally I might recommend a different style than what I do but that's my style that's what I do and so with one of our clients he had trying to remember I think it was like every tweet for the last four years was five words or less no hashtags and I just looked at that and I was like what are you trying to convey you know how are you trying to get people places but we had to write in his style because I didn't want anyone calling out the tweets we were putting on his Twitter account as being something that wasn't generated by him and so we adapted it's very different from my style though so my goal is that when a post or a page on a website when anything that is added to that site goes on there it feels like who the author is supposed to be it shouldn't feel like the author's guest blogger or ghost blogger so if you notice that the posts are starting to sound like you you're doing something wrong so keep those tabs keep the notes and realize what the no-no words are with the key phrases are that are used often or should be used often and and think about the location and favorite quotes and genre references and then watch social media so that you can see how people comment back and if your client comments back to them watch that discussion because that may impact the posts that you're writing and have your client become aware ask them to let you know it's really good to have that buy-in it may not be that they contact you every you know you may hear from them once every four months and they may say oh this is happening in my community we really want to write about this I'm providing the swag here's four pictures to use and that's something that really is great because you can bring that into the posts that you had slated to write for that event I have a client who desperately wanted to be you know number one first page of Google this was about four years ago when it was a lot easier to do that and there's a lot less competition but not for her phrase her phrase had a lot of competition because she's in a very exclusive area and so we had a long talk about it because she was three and she's like Jen we've been blogging for a year why am I not in slot one and I said we need an event we need something that's gonna push you up there and I said so I need you to watch and when a celebrity comes to your community and she's like well I can't I can't invade their privacy and I said no I'm not asking you to invade their privacy but if something happens where you're in a place where we can get a lot of traction to your blog I said it could just be going down to the beach when OP pros going on you know and and just happening to be in a picture with Christian Slater or something and being able to tag that and send people to the blog because we'd write a quick blog I said just snap a picture just do whatever you can so she went away thinking okay what can I do and about three weeks later on a Saturday night I get this phone call and this client I've been working with her for a long time and so she never calls me up on the weekend so I picked up because I was shocked and she said you'll never believe it George Clooney is here and I said what do you mean she's like I am in the theater he produced a movie and he is showing it and I'm here with him I said get a picture so she did and it wasn't a picture with him it was with her and him it was a picture of him standing in front of the stage and then we wrote a blog post or we we wrote a blog post about what was what was showing and the fact that they were there together but then the title combined her keyword term and his name and we tweeted it out and got it on Facebook and before we knew it we had tons of traffic to the site and she's been that first place ever since because that one event pushed her to the top and since we do continual content she stayed there real estate so very competitive industry so it's important that you respect what the client might bring to the table and if they have talent if they have events if they have an eye for something bring that into the blog and incorporate their ideas as well as your own so like that gets her solo you need to showcase your voice and use it to help your readers engage use authority because you know the topic you've done the research if you're the writer for the blog or if it's your own blog don't fear intensity because people love to read editorial pieces and be consistent we recommend twice weekly blogging for all of our clients and we follow that up with social media posting because if it's just on the blog and you don't have an established audience those posts are going to go unseen unless you're sharing them paint a picture with your words cyclists whizzing past evokes a very different meaning than a bike road by read each post after you've written it and give it an honest assessment and rewrite it if it doesn't capture the voice as you'd hoped and find and tell the truth we use some tools to help us to do this we have for our clients we use Google Drive and a series of spreadsheets to track the posts that are being written for them and the topics but if we find something that's more relevant or timely that takes place you know if that's going to happen before the next scheduled post we'll write on that and push the scheduled post because we want to be we want our clients to be in the know and there's also other options that you can use to track these things I know some people use Trello to track how they're gonna keep ideas for blog posts and those are good options but what you need to do is file any posts away that you think are particularly good so if you have other people writing on your team you can use those to teach them how to write for this particular client or you can use those posts to help you to find your voice when you maybe have too much going on and you can't quite get your head in the game sometimes reviewing particularly good older posts is a great way to do that and visualization so there are times where it can be hard to turn on that voice like I was saying and so when that happens we use a method or a technique that's similar to method acting where we advise our writers to pretend that they're the accountant or the lawyer or the community leader and then they write as them and it helps in capturing the right voice when you're having trouble because our job is to create an extension of the client learn to think and write as your client would if they had the time so to sum it all up here are my top 15 tips for ghostwriting one develop a target reader to envision your client's goal three create that client avatar a voice that you're gonna use specifically when writing for that client four keep a file of all of your clients information in each article you write for them and hold on to information like quotes and no-no words and phrases and do five do your research look at the past blog posts and current posts that are in the clients writing styles and talking style so that you can understand how to write for them six observe and interview your client and listen to how they talk and portray themselves this will help develop confidence and help you to develop that voice even more seven read things out loud I don't think I mentioned that actually but if you try talking in your client's voice you'll know if it matches them let's see eight tailor your voice to your medium so if it's a press release a blog post an informational article each of those may require something a little different nine write something you would read ten be unique and make yourself stand out make that post stand out so be credible and helpful in each one if you can and eleven take risks because if you don't feel a little adrenaline when you're pushing publish that may not be your best piece twelve communicate with your client thirteen have confidence and authority in your writing because people need to be pulled in fourteen decide about the formal informal and maybe even tour the company to get a feel for what their actual environment is like and fifteen invent a specific brand or voice you can bring as the ghost rider that is your own but that conveys their feelings and their the feel of their blog if the client wanted the words to sound exactly the same as before they probably wouldn't have hired you so whether you go stride or blog for yourself I'd like you to remember this quote by Alan Alda which oddly enough I found on my hotel key card when I checked into Raleigh you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition so trust yourself put your heart into the content you write and post your blog and then push publish get it out there so thank you for listening to me today I'm Jen Miller founder of need someone to blog and you can find me on linkedin or twitter at Jen blogs for you and if you have any questions I'm here or we can meet in the happiness bar if we're out of time


Welcome to Nation Beat. I am General Norville bringing you this brief on the pulse of our nation and highlights around the heart of St Lucia. Parliament has authorized the Minister for Finance to amend the loan agreement for the financing of the Denry North Water Project. A breadfoot-sized tumour is successfully removed from the abdomen of a MECO resident and St Lucia and the state of Palestine strengthen diplomatic ties. Parliament has authorized the Minister for Finance to amend the loan agreement for the financing of the Eighth Water Project that is the Denry North Water Supply Redevelopment Project. The Parliament has agreed to the borrowing of an amount not exceeding US$11.2 million from the Caribbean Development Bank. The loan consists of a special funds resources portion in the amount of US$4 million and US$65,000. An ordinary capital resources portion in the amount of US$2,163,000 and an urgent process to develop more credit facility portion in the amount of US$5 million. Parliamentary representative for Denry North Hon. Sean Edward, in supporting the motion, noted the impact that Phase 1 of the water project is having on the quality of life of residents and expressed a desire for the completion of Phase 2. Mr Speaker, as we speak now, the people of Tamazou, the people of Founi, the people of Lower Monpanache, Lower Debonair, the people of Richfaw, in particular, New Village and Labelvee are benefitting and are enjoying some of the best treated water in the OECS as a result of the completion of Phase 1. But Phase 1 has its limitations. And so communities such as Denry Revere, Despin, Olio, New Jack Montego Bay, Sedini, Lawyer Air, Gadet, Tigadet, Roger Jett, Austin Hill, Belmont, all of these communities today, Mr Speaker, have to continue to rely on the Denry Revere intake which has a number of issues in terms of the quality of water that we get from that particular intake. Booster or pumping stations will be placed at strategic locations to supply households at high elevations. Meantime, Minister for Equity, Social Justice and Empowerment, Hon. Leonard Montute pledged government's commitment to improving the standard of living for all citizens. Underscoring the importance of water to development, Minister Montute called on the citizenry to exercise their responsibility in ensuring the sustainability of the quality of water supplied. We want to know that this is not an occurrence in St. Lucia and that we do not contribute to those statistics. It is said that water scarcity affects in fact over 40% of people worldwide. We know that in St. Lucia there is no shortage of water. Our issue here is ensuring that that water is portable, that is it is safe for drinking and human consumption and that it is sustainable. The amount of rain that we have experienced in the recent past tells us that with proper storage, proper treatment and proper environmental practices, we should not have a problem as far as our supply and the standard of our supply is concerned. Minister Leonard Montute speaking in Parliament Tuesday. A resident of Miku is counting her blessings having successfully undergone non-invasive surgery to remove a breadfoot-sized tumor from her abdomen. The surgery was performed by the consultant surgeon and head of the surgical department at the Victoria Hospital. Glenn Simon has the details on the medical triumph. As part of the recent laparoscopic training conducted with doctors and nurses at the Victoria Hospital, one lucky patient was the beneficiary of this life-saving procedure. Laparoscopy is a surgical procedure in which a fibre optic instrument is inserted through the abdominal wall to view the organs in the abdomen or to permit surgical procedures. Flavia Florence, a resident from Miku, has been suffering from an enormous tumor in her abdomen which caused her great discomfort and internal bleeding. Her son-in-law Benoit Michel said he was extremely pleased with the outcome of the surgery and the care and attention she received at the Victoria Hospital. Very, very, very pleased, very happy, pleasantly surprised. When we found out about the tumor, we were very worried. You don't know what to expect. We caught up with Ms Florence four days after her operation. She was in high spirits, ready to be discharged and expressed her gratitude to the doctors who performed this life-saving procedure. Well, I feel very strongly before I go to surgery because I wanted to go for the surgery and I asked God to help me, give me the strength and courage that I could have gone through it. Yes, so when I walked in, I had no fear. I was not afraid of it, anything. Warning! The following footage might be disturbing to some persons. It describes the moment the breadfruit-sized tumor was removed during the operation by Dr. Kabe, the lead surgeon performing the laparoscopic surgery at the Victoria Hospital. Her recovery has been really remarkable. Blood loss has been very minimal and her pain level is very low. Patient is already drinking and taking some fluids has been an uneventful outcome compared to an open surgery which is completely opening the abdomen to be able to remove the tumor. For the Ministry of Health and Wellness, Glenn Simon reporting. This is Nation Beat. We're back in a moment. No one ever reads the fine print. But if you use a cell phone, landline, the internet or cable TV, read the terms of the service contract carefully and pay attention to the type of service, the length of the contract, contract renewal, penalties, fees for services, termination and reconnection. fee increases and how much notice is required. The option not to receive advertisements and sharing personal information with third parties. Do not sign a contract that you are not satisfied or comfortable with. This message is brought to you as a public service announcement by Ectel, the NTRC and this station. Welcome back. St. Lucia and the state of Palestine continue to strengthen diplomatic ties. The ambassador designate of the state of Palestine to St. Lucia presented letters of credence to Governor General Sir Emmanuel Neville Snack on Tuesday at Government House. On Tuesday, her Excellency Dr Linda Sobe Ali, Ambassador of the state of Palestine to St. Lucia presented letters of credence to the Governor General of St. Lucia, His Excellency Sir Emmanuel Neville Snack. She highlighted the significance of allies like St. Lucia given the current challenges confronting the country. We invite your honorable Governor General to nominate an ambassador of your own to serve your country in the state of Palestine, and we assure you that we will fulfill cooperate and highly welcome them within our capacity. Governor General, Excellency, from my end as an ambassador of the state of Palestine to St. Lucia, I will exert all my effort to honor this mission, entrusted upon me and further the cooperation between our two countries and the friendship between our two people. I am positive that together we will work on establishing a norm of political consultation between our governments as well as joint projects in various fields. This is an extremely honorable and important mission in which I fully believe I will receive assistance and support from your Excellency and your honorable government. Governor General of St. Lucia, His Excellency Sir Emmanuel Neville Snack, described the occasion as historic. He traced ties between the two countries back to the 14th of September 2015 when bilateral relations between the countries materialized. The Governor General added that the upgraded position of the state of Palestine to non-member observer states in the United Nations has provided it with a voice. Now that Palestine has a golden opportunity to participate fully, though not to vote, at the meetings of the UN, the Liberty Assembly, the door is opened for to make her voice heard and to persuade all as the rightness of the court. My government, I'm sure, will examine the financial implications concerning your request to nominate an ambassador to serve your country. An invitation was also extended to the Governor General to make an official visit of the state of Palestine where the two countries hoped to further discussions. From the Government Information Service, I am Anisia Antoine reporting. Minister for Youth Development and Sports Hon. Edmund Estefan hailed the recent athletic accomplishment of Julian Alfred in a special statement to the Parliament Tuesday. Minister Estefan saluted Alfred for capturing the silver medal at the just concluded Youth Olympics Games in Argentina. It was St. Lucia's first time meddling at the event. Julian's determination, energy, passion and most importantly her faith makes a clear statement that speaks to our youth, reminding them that excellence is a way of life developed through character, persistence and unyielding practice. Ms. Alfred's silver medal performance is the first ever Youth Olympic medal for St. Lucia. Mr. Speaker, Julian's silver medal is a great reason for national pride and delight. Her run of 11.23 seconds is what did it for us. It is our hope and with our support that she will continue to rise and be an inspiration and continue to be an inspiration to us all. Hon. Estefan noted that Julian Alfred joins a prestigious list of St. Lucia's sports personalities who have shown pride in recent years, including Darren, Sami, Laverne, Spencer, Johnson, Charles and Kimadi Melius. Through your remarkable efforts Ms. Alfred, you have radiated positive light in our nation by making the world see that our flag is more than just cloth and ink. That it embodies zeal, will, passion and sheer determination of our people from a tiny spot in a small corner of the Caribbean to rise to great heights of majestic proportions. Mr. Speaker, we may be small in size but we stand tall, proud and powerful that we are able to take on anyone and finish high on the podium of medals. Mr. Speaker, the triumph of Julian and Laverne in particular serves to urge and remind us that once we are serious about putting our hearts, body, mind and soul into even the smallest acts, success will be attained. The Department of Education, Innovation and Gender Relations will be staging the annual St. Lucia Care and College Fair 2018 on Wednesday, October 31 and Thursday, November 1 at the Finance Administrative Center Point Seraphine Castries. Participating in this year's college fair will be representatives from local educational institutions and institutions from the United States of America and United Kingdom and the Caribbean region. The theme for this year's college fair is securing our nation's future academically and professionally. This year's fair promises to be a successful and productive event as it will not only seek to target colleges, universities but will incorporate a career component. Members of the public are invited to attend the St. Lucia Care and College Fair 2018 on Wednesday, October 31, 2018, 10am to 6pm and Thursday, November 1, 2018 from 9am to 6pm to meet with the recruiters and advisors from the participating institutions. That's a nation bit. Join us next time on NTN at 7.30pm with a repeat at 7.30am and on this station as we fill the person heart of our community. You can also catch up with us anytime on the St. Lucia Government Facebook page or YouTube channel. I am Janelle Norvell.


Oh, to us it was incredible. It was just, you know, Erie was a magical playground, and I think your perspective of Erie as a child, depending on what age you were, because when you were, you know, five, six, seven, it was just huge. And you just ran free and wild, out of the house, who's out playing, who can come out and play, in and out of each other's houses, and all that. And as you got a little older, you know, 10, 11, 12, incredible games at night.   Sitting on the top of the steps, looking down to the tennis courts, where all your friends at IES and Manila were all visiting each other over the weekend, and the group of you were stuck here in the compound without much to do, and, you know, such incredible boredom you'd be convinced, Tinky, Navasar and I are still convinced we saw a UFO in the sky one night, and, you know, we'd sit there praying that somebody's parents would get a shipment from Denmark so we could have some real potato chips, and, you know, just, but those times too, built some of the greatest bonds and the greatest memories, we were all already just so close and so tight, all the kids, like a big group, big family, big group of siblings and everything. And my dad wasn't the talker at home, but it was usually my mom talking about animals of some sort, and if the subject wasn't about animals, you find a way to direct it to animals. But now my dad didn't talk a lot about it, and we knew his title sounded important, Agricultural Economist, but invariably the next question was, well, what's he doing? I have absolutely no idea, you know, we just had no idea, and to the point where there were friends of mine in Manila that were seriously concerned because, you know, we lived out in this remote area, they weren't even sure we had electricity out there, you know, and, you know, they'd ask about my dad and, you know, he's gone for many months out of the year, and, you know, we can't really pinpoint exactly where he is at any given time, but, you know, we get a postcard once in a while, you know, and some friends expressed a real concern that they thought he was really, you know, part of the CIA and we were in some sort of witness protection program or something, you know, they just, we had no idea what he did, we really didn't.


Hi, global supply chainers, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening for those that are far away from here. We have students from more than 180 countries, which is very, very exciting. So welcome to this fourth Hangout event. My name is Eva Ponce. I'm the Executive Director of the MicroMaster Program, Supply Chain Management. We are very lucky to have today with us Dr. Josue Velakev. Dr. Velakev, he is the Director of the Latin American Global Network Scale, and he's also a research associate here at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. He has prepared the screen game. This is an innovative role-playing game, an interactive tool that I hope you have enjoyed to play the game. And he has also prepared for today a debrief in order to discuss with you the conclusions and to highlight the main results of this game. So thanks a lot, Dr. Velakev, to be with us today and to prepare this material for our SCX still. We are approaching the end of SC3X. So I know you are working hard. You just need one last push, the final stretch, take the final exam, and then you are going to be done with SC3X. So please keep up the good work. Today, in addition to have Dr. Velakev, as I mentioned before, he's going to discuss the first 15 minutes, the debrief of the screen game, we are going to have Professor Sheffi. Professor Sheffi is the Director of the Center for Transportation and Logistics, and he's an expert in risk and resilience. He has been working in supply chain management during the last 40 years. So I think it's a great opportunity and an honor for us to have him today in this Hangout and to give you the opportunity to discuss with Professor Sheffi those questions you might have on risk and resilience. The idea is as in previous Hangout, we are going to start with this debrief, then you are going to move to the breakout session for 15 minutes. This time, you know that we always are trying to include an improvement and to do things a little bit better. So this time we have with us our postdocs in the team, they are going to join the breakout session in order to facilitate and moderate the discussion. So the idea is that all of you have the opportunity to share your opinion and help you also to identify these relevant questions before to come back to the lobby and share with us your questions and discuss with Professor Sheffi. So I hope you enjoyed even today. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Velázquez and thanks again. Now my pleasure, my pleasure Eva. So well, good morning. It's really a great pleasure to be to be here this morning. And if I understand correctly, you already have the slides and the materials and also the results of the game. So we have this game for I think it was one week or two weeks actually open. And I have all the ideas to just introduce a little bit about the game and then to show the results and some interesting insights and conclusions that you can take with this. So as Eva said, I'm a research associate and I lead the initiatives of the Center for Latin America. And if you can actually have the presentation open, like showing the slides with the animations or not, just let me know, I will try to lead you with the number of the slides. So we are now actually in the slide number two. And this is actually the main, let's say, assumption of the game. When we deal actually with general variability in supply chain, usually we deal with the type of solutions that I related more into the concept of safety stock or trying to work with lead times or to try to work with forecast tools. When we deal actually with the disruptions and these resilience in supply chain, these things actually have very low probability of happening. But once they happen, actually this can destroy the supply chain the way that we are used to manage. It's much more than just general volatility, it's something that is really hard to predict. And that's why we deal with this with a slightly different type of mitigation strategy that I will try to elaborate a little bit more. So just to make it very clear for you, we didn't give you any information about the type of disruptions that you could have in this screen game. But this is part of the tools or the conditions context of the game. You don't know this. The idea is that we are going to play the role of a dictator. We are going to create just disruptions as scenarios that we may believe this can happen. And then the idea is we are going to test your policies, how good they were under these conditions. So if we go very fast to slide number three, we have the description of the screen game. So you were giving a very basic simple supply chain with supplier plan at distribution center. And the idea is that we are going to have disruptions in either supplier plan distribution centers. And the idea is that you should decide robust mitigation strategy that aims at minimizing the total cost, and at the same time, and maximizing the order of filling. And the idea was to give a five-digit code in which you have the inventory that you plan to keep in working process, in finished goods, and also the configuration of the type of strategy of backup plan distribution center or supplier you expect to get. Anyway, so if we move just to slide four and five, we have some of the questions that we actually were expecting you will be asking before deciding your policy. You could actually just decide to go with a safety stock, which means not to do anything, right? Because clearly, safety stock and backup inventory are different. The safety stock is for the general volatility of your supply chain. And the backup is specifically for the cases of this disruptions in supply chain. You could actually decide to have some backup inventory, either in working process or finished goods, or you could have a combination, right? Like backup in facility plan distribution centers, suppliers, or combinations of all of these. So the idea is what is actually the best mix to be more resilient in case you have a disruption in the supply chain. Again, you also have different alternatives. You can either decide to go for a strategy that protects you more in the supply, or they're more in the plant, and they're more in the distribution center. And the question is also what could be the best way to have a better backup in case of disruptions in supply chain. Anyway, so if we go to slide number six, this is just a general discussion on how we generally decide policies or solutions in logistics or supply chain management. And usually what we do is that we follow the common approach of minimizing costs or maximizing the investment or general approaches that are very single objective. So in this case, I'm showing just a dimension of cost. And then we have two mitigation strategies, one that is in the green circle and the other in the red circle. And then we say, well, what is the best mitigation strategy? And following this common approach in operations management, we can always decide. I mean, hopefully you are also driving to the same conclusion of selecting the green circle, which is the one that has the minimum cost. So this is a very basic approach on supply chain management, but actually it's a tool that we use very commonly for many logistics decisions. But if we go now to slide number seven, and now imagine that we have exactly the same policies, but now we have disruption in the supply chain. And if we have a disruption, now it turns out that this green circle solution is actually the optimal cost, but it still is providing the lowest service level, while the other solution that was much more expensive is providing a higher service level. So we have these two extremes, and this happens because we have a disruption in the supply chain. And the interesting part of this is that if we actually have a situation of not having any disruption in the supply chain, both solutions are providing exactly the same service level. But once we have a disruption, then it's when we start assessing the difference between these two strategies. And the idea of this is that in case we don't have any disruption, then actually that one that was very expensive can put us out of business. And in the case we have a disruption, actually the other one that didn't have any investment in cost could put us out of business as well. And this is the main reflection of this. When we make a decision on supply chain management, particularly in the case of disruptions, we are actually expecting to do an investment that maybe we will not get back never. It's like thinking in the return investment of a health insurance. We pay for the health insurance, but we expect not to use it never. So if we go now to the slide number eight, we actually come out with a general idea of this trade-off between service level and cost, which means we can actually get more solution that just these extreme points of trying to find the best solution from the case of service level and the best solution in the case of cost. So getting all these other solutions can actually solve the problem. And among these solutions, we can actually find those solutions that are actually in this front, the front of the efficient set of solutions that are dominating the rest of the solutions. So if we see the solutions that are actually in the red circle, we observe that these solutions are dominating the rest, but at the same time we cannot distinguish which one is better than the other. While one, for instance, the green one is the best in terms of cost, I can find another one that is maybe not as good in cost like the green one, but this is better in service level. And then we can find the other that actually is better in the same terms until we go completely to the other side of the front, which is a solution that is the best in service level. And to decide which one is the best between them is not an easy task, right? But just finding solutions that are in that set, then we are getting closer to finding a better mitigation strategy. So, well, in general, if we go just to slide nine and 10, we get the concept of robustness in a system. So we are trying to find a mitigation strategy that can actually cope with different potential disruptions or scenarios, right? And if we find a solution that most of the cases belongs very close to the front for different scenarios, this is a robust solution. This is able to actually deal with a variety of potential disruptions and those has a high ability to tolerate these perturbations, right? And in slide number 10, we have an example of this. We have, this is just example. So imagine that we have three different disruptions that are in these scenarios. And then in the first scenario, we get a pariet of front with solutions A, B, C and D, right? So all of them are the best solutions we found for this case.  And then in the third scenario, A, F, G, H. So by watching these different results for these hypothetical scenarios, we can argue at the end or conclude that this policy A is a robust solution because actually in these three scenarios belong in the pariet of front. So then if we go to slide number 11, I can show you the scenarios that we use for the screen game. So these scenarios were created based on previous disruptions we observed in supply chain. And in general, if you observe, for instance, scenario one in this table, is the scenario in which we don't have any disruption, which means we start a disruption in week one with a duration of zero and we are ready to be online in the first week. So nothing happened in the distribution center plan and the supplier. But if we go, for instance, to maybe the scenario five, in scenario five, we can observe, for instance, that we have a disruption distribution center that will start in the week 12. We last for 36 weeks and then we will be ready in the week 48. And then we have scenarios like this for disruptions distribution centers in plants and suppliers. And then we created this new concept of, we name it also like scenarios, right? For instance, the sunny day. So sunny day scenarios, which we have the probability of 100% having the scenario number one, which means nothing will happen. And we have, for instance, another scenario that is even probability. Then this considers 10% for all the previous scenarios that I'm just showing in that slide. And then we created combinations like this and using these new scenarios, we assess the best policy, looking for those policies that belong most of the time in the predator front. So I hope this is quite clear. So if we go now to the slide number 12, then actually we build this framework to make the assessment, right? So if we take, again, the red circle in the left, we get the optimal cost solution with actually the lowest service level. And in the other extreme, we get the highest cost solution with the maximum amount of service level. And then if this is just a line, just a curve that is actually showing an estimation of the predator front. Although we know that in this case, this area or this curve is actually non-converged, this is just an approximation just to show how it might look. And then we can actually draw a line, you know, in the vertical axis when we have the service level, we can draw a line of saying, well, you know, I will not accept any mitigation policy that provides less than 90 or 95% of feel rate, for instance. And we can actually later draw another line that is in the horizontal axis for the cost to say, well, this is a line of the average cost. So if I have a policy that provides higher cost than this, then I'm not interested in that problem. And then later, I can also draw another line, you know, a line that goes between the minimum cost and then the average cost, you know, this red line. And this one just distinguishes those solutions that are gonna be closer to the predator front, right? So those solutions are actually very good solutions because are providing for a fair amount of cost, good level of service for this case. And then we can actually distinguish the different areas now. We have those that are in the red circles, it is like a clear red circle in which we are not interested in those policies, right? For instance, the one that is in the left-hand side is more like the greedy approach, right? So we don't want to invest a lot of money because we are following the traditional approach of operations management, of looking for solutions that minimize cost, and then we get very low service level. And if we go to the other square, there is in the right-hand side, then actually the other approach like saying, well, you know, I care a lot about service level that I don't care about investing all the money that I need. You know, I put a lot of money and I'm protecting myself, you know, with very conservative approach. And then of course the other, that is the darker red circle, square, I'm sorry. If you are in this area, you may be looking maybe for another profession, right? Because you are investing a lot of money and you're getting very low service level, right? But then the other solutions that are in the blue and green area, are actually smart solutions, right? Those that are in the green area are very close to the priority front and those that are in the blue are also fair, you know, for the amount of money you invest getting sufficient amount of service level. So what we did actually with your policies was to count how many times you were either in the red area, in the blue area, or in the green area. And we give, well, if you are in the green area, we give you one point, I'm sorry, two points. If you are in the blue area, we give you one point and if you are in the red circle, you're zero points, right? Because there are not solutions that we are interested in. So let me just go very fast for the results, right? So if you go in slides 14 and 15, you can see the list of participants. So I expect to have all your names or the EDX ID names there, so you can find yourself and we are assigning a specific number so you can actually use this number to find in the charts, how do you do, right? So let me just show you some charts as an example. So we have in slide number 16, there's like a scenario and then in the blue line, you can see the priority front.  And well, in this case, we see some solutions very close to the green area, the blue area and others that are in the red areas, right? If we go for instance to the other, the one that I just mentioned before, even probability. In even probability again, we get some solutions and we have one solution that actually belongs to the circle, right? But it's interesting that in these 16 and 17 slides, we observe for instance, the circle, the blue circle that is actually the number 12 participant is very conservative, right? So he's investing or she's investing a lot of money to keep very high service level, right? And then on the other side, we have the other optimal call solution, which is like a pentagon or what is it? Yeah, I think so, which is a 47, right solution. So anyway, just to show you another one, when we get DC down long-term, so this scenario considers getting for like 36 weeks of shutdown of the distribution center. And in this case, again, we get solutions that actually are not very resilient, let's say it, and we get more solutions that are now in the red circle, right? So anyway, I will go now to the slide number 19 and just to show you the winners. So in the winners, we have all those teams that actually got very good scores. Practically in all the scenarios, their solutions were in the green set. So they got actually all the possible points and interesting also to observe the differences. For instance, if we go for the 36 team or participant, actually the backup policy, just check out the configuration, it's 666, right? But if we go for instance to the number 30, actually it's 537, and it's quite interesting how by having different configurations, you make it actually a similar results in terms of how robust is your solution for a mitigation problem, for a supply chain risk management problem. So anyway, so let me just conclude by showing some observation of the screen game, and I'm sure that you'll learn a lot following the course of Professor Sheffi on resilience and general, we know that actually different policies perform better in different scenarios, and it's always better to get a combination of redundancy and flexibility, right? Which means to have also inventory, but at the same time also to have backup facilities and distribution centers. And in this case, we just created the scenarios, as I said, playing the role of a dictator, but this actually is an informed process, and well now that Professor Sheffi will take over the hangout, he's gonna talk also of potential things that may happen in different supply chains and in the world, right? And it's important to be informed on this and to be prepared for this. Some of the key learnings come in the slide number 21, and just keep in mind that nobody gets credit for solving problems that didn't happen, right? So this is also part of resilience to be prepared for something that has very low probability of happening, but actually they happen, right? And just keep in mind also that it's always better to, in general, right, to be prepared and to have backups for the entity of the supply chain that is closer to your customers, right? Because if that disruption occurs in the distribution center, usually you are affected immediately and usually you should be careful in that. Anyway, so with that, I say goodbye. Emma, so it was very nice being with you and now I leave you with Professor Sheffi and if you have any questions, at the end of the slide, you can find my email, is the toughest email ever in MIT, hosue.mit.edu, it's been a pleasure to be with you. Dr. Velazquez, thank you so much, hosue. It's a pleasure. I'm very happy to offer our SCX student this innovative interactive tool. I think this is something that they really much appreciate, some tool that they can interact, they can include the decisions and things also for this debrief and to analyze the results with them. Thanks a lot. My pleasure. And now we are going to start with the second part of this hangout. So it's my pleasure to have here today Professor Sheffi with us. Professor Sheffi is the director of the Center for Transportation and Logistics and he's an expert in risk and resilience. So he has a lot of experience with different industry, many companies. I hope you are going to take advantage to have today Professor Sheffi with us in order to ask him those questions, those question regarding to risk, to resilience that you want him to discuss with you. Thanks, Professor Sheffi, to be with us today. Nice to be here. Perfect. So first thing we are going to do is we already shared with you three articles. One is related to Samsung Galaxy, Note 7. The second one was the Hanging Case and the third one is the Brexit. So this is just three ideas to start the discussion. So we want you now to move to the breakout session to discuss with your peers. We are also to have our postdoc moderating the breakout session and after 15 minutes, please come back to the lobby, come back to the chat, share with us your questions and those topics that you want to have Professor Sheffi thoughts on these topics and we will be very happy to discuss with you. Thank you. Okay.


So good afternoon everyone. This is Chris Cox from Carleton University. Thank you so much for the chance to participate in this workshop and sorry not to be able to join you in person. I'm actually filming this from here in the Yukon Territory in far Northwestern Canada where my wife and I are helping out with a language workshop this week. I wish I were able to join you in person, but I hope that this video will be helpful. This is meant to be a short introduction to a small tool that I've been working on called Persephonea Lawn. So over the next 15 minutes or so, I'm hoping to introduce you to some of the basic features of Persephonea Lawn. Some of the things that it currently does and doesn't do and hopefully give you a sense of how you might be able to apply it to some of your own projects. As I understand it, you already have covered or will be covering this afternoon how to train up your own Persephonea phoning recognition models. As we'll see in a few moments, that's going to be important for you to use Persephonea Lawn in your own work. I need to start with a few acknowledgments here. A number of the examples that we'll be seeing in the slides to come are from the Tsutana language. Danny language spoken in Southern Alberta in Western Canada. These come primarily from the Tsutana Language Commissioner Bruce Starlight. I need to thank him for his help and support throughout all of this work. With regards to Persephonea, Oliver Adams and Alexi Michio have both provided substantial support for this work. And within Canada, there's also been support from Compute Canada and the Centre for Advanced Computing in developing some of the Persephonea models that we'll be seeing today. So what is Persephonea Lawn then? This is a small open-source plugin or recognizer that brings in some of this automatic phoning recognition provided by Persephonea into Elan's user interface. What it does more specifically is take an existing phoning recognition model that you've trained for Persephonea as well as a tier that contains a number of blank annotations in Elan applies that model to those segments and then returns the corresponding phonemes that Persephonea recognizes and gives them back to you on a new tier. So essentially if we have a blank annotation in Elan we would pass that tier off to Persephonea Lawn and after some crunching it would return back the corresponding phoneme string that it recognized. Now Persephonea Lawn has a number of software requirements that are important to note at the outset. It's currently macOS or Linux only. There's no support for Windows written in at the moment. The people that I'm working with on related projects don't really have much need for that feature. If this is something that would be useful for people about this workshop or elsewhere, please let me know. This wouldn't necessarily be that hard to implement though it would take some planning to do. Persephonea Lawn also works well with recent versions of Elan. It's been tested with versions 5.6, 5.7, all the way up to the current 5.8 release. It may work well with earlier versions as well, but they haven't been tested. To run Persephonea Lawn you'll need to have a version of Python 3 installed either 3.6 or 3.7 as well as FFmpeg. Now this is the tool that Persephonea Lawn uses to convert some of its media files behind the scenes. You should be able to find installers for both of those programs fairly easily online. Again if you have any problems there please let me know and I'll be glad to provide more pointers. Probably most importantly for Persephonea Lawn to work it currently requires that you've installed Persephonea system-wide. So for the copy of Python that you have installed in your computer you need to make sure that Persephonea is installed so that any application that can access it. So not just in a virtual environment. If you're a Mac user and you open up Terminal you can usually do this by typing in the command given in green there, pip3 install Persephonea and that'll do the trick. Lastly and as I mentioned before Persephonea Lawn relies on having at least one existing Persephonea model that it can apply to your transcripts. Developing those models training them on the basis of existing documentation is outside of the scope of this little tutorial but I've included a link here to the documents for Persephonea where they describe exactly how this is done. Now there are also a number of important limitations to take into consideration here. For one Persephonea Lawn is very much early alpha version software. I have a number of improvements still in the works but the current version as we'll see is still a little rough around the edges in places. So if it breaks on you unexpectedly, if something doesn't work quite as planned, if it's a little slower than you might hope it would be, don't panic please let me know. A number of these things are issues that can be addressed in ongoing development but just be aware this is still very much in the early days. Persephonea Lawn is currently being developed under macOS and that's where most of the testing has happened. So as it stands it should run reasonably well under Linux without any adjustments but as I mentioned before more work would be needed to create a Windows friendly version. So Windows users this tool currently won't do much for you although again if there's interest it wouldn't be necessarily all that hard to add that as a feature. Lastly and I can only stress this so much Persephonea Lawn really does need to have an existing Persephonea model. So we don't at least we won't be talking about here how to train up a new model on the basis of say existing recordings or existing text that you may have it only makes the process easier of applying a model that you developed to new recordings. So over the next few slides I'd like to just take us briefly through the steps that we need to use to actually go download configure install and actually start using Persephonea Lawn with your own materials. So Persephonea Lawn is currently hosted on GitHub there's a small repository there with the current version of the source code I've included the link at the bottom of the screen where you want to go to find the current release is under releases right so close to the top of the page where it says three releases there currently the current version as of today is version 0.1.2 all you'll need in order to run Persephonea Lawn is the top source code link to this zip file. If you download that zip file on your computer you can expand it on a Mac that would just be double clicking and you'll see it's just a single folder that folder contains all the files that you'll need to run Persephonea Lawn. Now before we can actually put excuse me move those files inside of a Lawn that is install the software we do need to make sure to edit one configuration file first this is where we tell Persephonea Lawn where can find the version of Python that it needs to use and where it finds a version of ffmpeg that's going to use to clip and edit media files right so the file we need to edit specifically is one called Persephonea Lawn.sh so on most Mac computers you can just right click or command click on that file go to open with and use the text editor of your choice here I've opened it using text edit in this file there's two lines that you'll likely need to edit you can see them highlighted in blue here the first is the location of the version of Python that Persephonea Lawn should use so in this case we're using Python version 3.6 so this is the full path on your computer that takes you to Python 3 that's the first line the second line is to the directory or the folder where your copy of ffmpeg is located now if you're not sure where either those programs is located on your computer again if you're a Mac user you can open up the terminal application and then type in both of these commands that are in green so which Python 3 that should give you the full path to that version of Python assuming it's installed in your system and which ffmpeg which again if ffmpeg is properly installed should you give you the full path and you can copy and paste those paths directly in between the double quotes on the appropriate lines. Now once you've made those two edits and saved that file Persephonea Lawn is ready to be installed now again under macOS this actually involves moving this Persephonea Lawn folder inside of Lawn's application bundle so in your applications folder we're going to find a Lawn right click on it open up its package contents and then move your Persephonea Lawn folder inside the application itself so here's a short video to show what we mean so again I've opened my applications folder I go and find my copy of a Lawn I right click on it and go show package contents now this opens up what's inside the Lawn application then I drill down to contents Java extensions and it's this extensions folder that holds all the Lawn plugins and I can just drag and drop my Persephonea Lawn folder into there right so that's all we need to do to install Persephonea Lawn in that way it's just like any other plugin any other recognizer that's been developed for Lawn so far once it's installed we can open a Lawn and actually apply an existing Persephonea Phoneme recognition model to a tier of our liking in one of our transcripts now to do that we do need to tell Persephonea a little bit or pardon me Persephonea Lawn a little bit about our Persephonea model so specifically we need to let it know the folder where Persephonea model or experiment is how that model was configured so specifically which feature types we used for phonetic features and what labels we used to provide the text and where the original training data for that model are Persephonea Lawn feeds that information back into Persephonea behind the scenes to reboot that model essentially and then apply it to these new unseen snippets of audio that we're getting from our Lawn transcript now I'm hoping over time that we can make changes to the Persephonea source code to actually save these settings inside the models themselves so that the only thing we need to provide to Persephonea Lawn is the path to our pre-trained model but for now this is information that we have to enter manually into the Persephonea Lawn interface for myself once I've trained up a model in Persephonea I usually just keep a small text file that has all of this information there in the example we'll see in a second I've entered this information the appropriate fields already but again these are the things that you should be able to recover from your model training process fairly easily so again here's a short video showing what this looks like so here we have a transcript and this is again the Tutana language with Elder Bruce Starlight so you can see we have a number of empty annotations or textless annotations on a main tier what we want to do is provide that tier to Persephonea's phoning recognizer so in the recognizer's tab we select Persephonea phoning recognizer and then we provide the settings I was just describing so in this case we trained our model using fbank for phonetic features the text that was provided this model all those text snippets had this file extension again this will look a little bit different for your particular model we've built in support for Tutana's orthography here but again in your case you'd most likely choose none and what you'll get then are the actual phoneme strings that come out of Persephonea with no conversions happening behind the scenes we want to provide this BRS tier that's excuse me that's the tier that contains all of the empty annotations that Persephonea is going to try to recognize lastly we want to provide a reference to the directory where the original training data is so in this case for the Tutana model that we're using here and lastly excuse me to the model itself to the source experiment directory there's a final field here as well for output recognized text this is essentially just a junk file we can't get away with producing Alon makes us do this don't worry too much about it once we hit start Persephonea Alon will start picking out all the individual clips from that tier reload the Persephonea model that we provided and then actually ask Persephonea to start transcribing each of the clips on that tier right so each annotation is being fed to it when we're ready it'll load the corresponding tier and we can listen to the results so you can see here it's recognizing only segments but also also the tones that are marked with diacritics so as we mentioned before there are a number of settings that you need to have for your model at that point once you've entered that information it's as simple as selecting the tier you want to apply this to and pressing start right now you'll notice that the Persephonea output here appears on its own tier this is again a limitation of Alon's current plugin infrastructure if you need to copy the contents of that text from one tier to another though that's something you can do through the annotations menu in Alon so concluding then Persephonea Alon is definitely still in its early days there are a number of important features that I'm still working on at the moment and I'm hoping to improve upon some of which will potentially require changes to the Persephonea code base but even in its current state I'm hoping that Persephonea Alon and tools like it might help make Persephonea more accessible to other documentary linguists and other users of Alon if you have any feedback or comments or possible bug reports related to the software they're certainly welcome feel free to submit any of them via github or if you prefer by email to the address given here thank you