Ensuring Accurate Graduate Name Announcements

Tassel’s name generation and recording solutions provide ceremony organizers with peace of mind that their graduates’ names will be announced clearly and accurately on graduation day.

“We’re focused on getting these names right because it’s the most important day for these students—one of the most important days of their lives, and for their families,” explains Miranda Smith, Tassel’s Quality Assurance Project Lead.

From collecting proper name pronunciations, through recording and testing, each graduate name goes through a stringent process to ensure that it’s pronounced clearly and accurately on graduation day.

Professional Name Announcements

For more than a decade, Tassel relied solely on manual recordings from voice professionals to provide accurate and professional name announcements. With the introduction of synthetically generated audio, an exciting new opportunity to expand access and affordability to this feature presented itself, while still maintaining the same high standard of quality.

As part of this exciting new shift, we partnered with our longtime voice professionals to allow us to use their voices in generating graduate names with AI. These new synthetic voices are virtually indistinguishable from manually recorded announcements. Instead of our voice professionals recording thousands of names a season, they only need to manually record names when the synthetic version is insufficient, all while continuing to be compensated for each generated name.

Collecting Proper Name Pronunciations

As part of the registration process, graduates using Tassel’s platform gain access to a suite of name tools designed to ensure accurate name pronunciation during the ceremony. First, they will see the suggested written pronunciation of their name, generated from Tassel’s continually‑growing 50,000+ database of names from around the world. If the suggestion does not match their preferred pronunciation, students can provide their own phonetic spelling using guided examples.

Next, graduates can listen to their name announcement right on the registration website. They can approve the pronunciation or direct the system to try again. Our website will attempt to generate the name up to three times. Finally, if all three pronunciations are incorrect, the graduate will be prompted to record their own name. This recording is then reviewed by a professional voice artist who will ensure the name is pronounced correctly based on the provided reference.

If schools opt for live ceremony announcements, these synthetically generated audio files and graduate recordings can still be utilized to ensure accurate name announcements by live school readers.

Quality Assurance Testing

Since the introduction of synthetic name announcements, graduates are able to approve their name recordings for accuracy. Any names that are not approved by the graduates themselves are sent to our team of quality assurance testers who check each name recording against the graduate information for clarity and accuracy. During peak ceremony season, Tassel employs a large team of checkers to test the quality of the name recordings.

Smith looks for specific qualities in each name checker. “It’s good to have a facility with languages or at least an idea of how it’s supposed to sound. We look for a specific type of person to be able to check—a type of person who’s a little worldly, somebody who is, if not fluent in some other language, at least conversant to understand the phonetic sounds of the names.”

In the first level of testing, each recording is checked twice – once by each of two testers. The checkers flag any names that were pronounced incorrectly or contained any errors or background noises. “We check to make sure that there are not any noises, glitches or hissing on the final recording and that the name pronunciations are correct,” said Smith.

After the two checkers have finished testing each name, flagged recordings are reviewed by Smith and re‑recorded as needed by our voice professionals.

“The reader re‑records all the flagged names, those recordings come back to me and I check them through as many times as we need to get it right,” said Smith.

Peace of Mind

Tassel’s professional name recording solutions give our clients peace of mind that their graduates’ names are recorded professionally and accurately—eliminating the worry of mispronouncing a graduate’s name at one of the most important moments of their lives.

“What you have here is a comprehensive way to get rid of that worry. It’s all done for you by people who have done this repeatedly, every year—not once a year or twice a year, but several hundred times a year,” says Smith.

Join us for a demonstration and see how our solutions can deliver professional and accurate name recordings for your next ceremony.