Giving an Award-Winning Speech on my iPad
Two days after returning from our week in Las Vegas, Darrell and I attended Douglas College’s Self-Employment Program’s Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. I had been nominated for the High Tech Award. (Yes, sometimes life is rough!)
I needed to prepare a one-minute acceptance speech in the event of being announced as the finalist. Not eager to need to pull out my laptop, which takes longer than a minute to boot, I wanted to be able to whip out my iPad for the task.
But how could I get the NeoSpeech voice of Kate, which I use in all of my presentations and which people have come to recognize as “my voiceâ€, onto my iPad?
Yes, I do have the text-to-speech Proloquo2Go app on my iPad, but Kate is yet a voice option. I wasn’t feeling adequately geeky to get the Kate voice file from the CD onto my iPad, assuming that file format is even compatible with the app. That mash-up might still come; later, after consuming an appropriate level of dark chocolate.
Then brilliance struck: what if I used my text-to-speech TextAloud on my computer to create the audio file and then email it as an attachment to myself on my iPad? My experiment passed the test in the lab. Would it work flawlessly live?
When the award program came to the High Tech category, the nominees were announced and the award sponsor, the Business in Vancouver Media Group, introduced. I woke up my iPad and held my breath.
Remarks about the finalist were made and then the winner’s name announced: Glenda Watson Hyatt of Soaring Eagle Communications.
I drove up in front of the stage, with my iPad on my lap. I was presented with my crystal brick award. Official photographs were taken. Then the Master of Ceremonies knelt beside me, holding a microphone next to my iPad. I tapped play and Kate spoke my acceptance speech perfectly!
Screenshot of the Quicktime player on my iPad
Except…
There was a technical difficulty with the microphone…it was not on! My brief speech was not heard. My heart sank, but I kept smiling.
Once Kate had finished, the emcee kindly took my iPad up to the podium mic. Having never used an iPad before, he was able to figure out to tap play. My words were then heard.
Another door had opened for me in that moment: I had just given my first speech on my iPad!
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