TTS Systems for Android

TTS Systems for Android   ABSTRACT There are different kinds of TTS (Text to Speech) systems are already available for Personal computers and web applications. In the Platform of Smart Phone, few of TTS systems are available for Bangla Language. Nowadays android is a popular platform considering Smartphone. There are few Bangla TTS Systems are Available with different kind of Mechanisms and techniques, various kind of tools were used. Here we tried to introduce all mechanisms together and proving a summary above all existing system. Introduction There are more than 250 million people over 4 states of 2 countries in the world speaks Bengali. We are looking for a device which would be able to read any bangla text aloud. So now there is no other device than mobile phone as a better option. There are more than 14 million mobile users in Bangladesh and 30% of them are using smart phones. Use of smart phones are increasing day by day because of reliability, maximum features, capable of using faster internet and eligible for open source application based system. So these kind of features are making our communication very easier and maximum communication is happening over text messaging. So for making our life very easier there are many TTS engines are available for English and many other languages. For bangla there are few more TTS Systems are available in smart phones Platform. Text and Speech both are very powerful communication infliction. If we can make it easier by converting from text to speech or vice versa than it would be a great achievement in communication life cycle, it will make communication easier than before. People would be able to speak their own words by texting only via Mobile Phone. Speech is the most natural form of communication and interaction. Speech Synthesis is a major part of TTS engine and for Bangla it is done in many different ways by different authors. From all those we will get the basic idea of Speech Synthesis Techniques. It is apparent that we are using pre recorded voices for TTS engines yet. Maximum system renders symbolic linguistic representation. So we will discuss about the existing system and possibilities of making the voice very much realistic. The concatenation of final token of speech should be patterned as like real communication. Recorded voices are stored in Database. System differ in the size of the stored units. As for being the speeches or words recorded by human then the clarity may vary. Maximum author tried to put most of the effort to code optimization and database compression. Theyve tried to found many new methods of Speech Synthesis also. Android is a popular Smart phone operating system because of it allows open source applications to install and use, For this reason anyone can try for making better applications for using or business purpose. So it is very important to build a bangla TTS for android. The purpose of our research is to introduce with all of the best TTS Existing systems for Bangla in Android Platform, and ensuring the quality research outputs , findings and Placing possible future works .We discussed about the key points of individual authors and at the end we shown the comparison between all of those. Edification and research for Bangla TTS Engine was improved very highly in last few years. For Android mobile there are many publications available. So here we will discuss about few of them. Case Study 1: After studying the paper Title (A benglai Speech Synthesizer on Android OS), authors names (Sankar Mukherjee and Shyamal Kumar Das Mandal ), we have found that they were trying to develop Bengali speech synthesizer on mobile device. They have used Epoch Synchronous Non Overlap Add (ESNOLA) based concatenative speech synthesis technique for Speech generation. They work hard for database compression because where as space was very limited, small diaphone database was being used in previous days which reduced the quality of synthesized Speech. But in other hand (Pucher, M. and Frohlich, 2005) introduced with large unit selection database, they used a Server for synthesized output speech. It was mandatory to transferred the wave form to a mobile device over a network. They tried a quality output in almost real-time on Mobile device. Speech synthesis is the method of input text data to speech waveforms conversion. The Synthesis method ascertained by the vocabulary size. For utterances of the speech need to be modeled. There are many speech synthesis techniques such as rule-based, articulatory modeling and concatenative technique. But here they developed their synthesizer based on Epoch Synchronous Non Overlap Add (ESNOLA) concatenative speech synthesis method. ESNOLA provides moderate processing for proper matching between different segments during concatenation and it supports unlimited vocabulary without decreasing the quality. So this could be proposed as a good technique of Speech Synthesis. They have designed their full operational method as the given diagram. They divided the system in 4 parts including Input text and output speech state. In between they have planned two important states which is Text analysis module and Synthesizer Module. Where the major operations designed to be performed. A perfect speech required many things such as intonation, prosody, phonological words. And specially handling exception is mandatory while converting text to speech. In this paper they have tried to work with all those parts have mentioned. In their system model they introduced a module named Text analysis module. Which have two sections named phonological analysis module and other one is Analysis of the text for prosody and intonation. They work with the exceptional words at the first Phonological rule part. They developed and implemented phonological rule analysis of the text for prosody and intonation as (Basu, J et al., 2009). They have also work with the exceptional dictionary due to requirement of language analysis. So total processing of text related part ends in phonological analysis module. And synthesizing will be done by the next module. Synthesizer module works for generating a realistic and quality speech .after getting the finalized text from text analysis module they generate a token and then combine splices of pre-recorded Speech and generate the synthesized voice output using ESNOLA approach as in Shyamal Kr Das Mandal, et al. (2007). In ESNOLA approach, the synthesized output speech is generated by concatenating the basic signal segments from the signal dictionary at epoch positions. They synthesized like e.g à  Ã‚ ¦Ã‚ ­Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¦Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¦Ã‚ ²Ãƒ  Ã‚ §Ã¢â‚¬ ¹ = bh + bha + a + aL+o . They had implemented their application in below System specification. Memory management is a major issue in android platform otherwise it wouldnt be used broadly. In this paper they have mentioned that This context will live as long as this application is alive and does not depend on the activities life cycle. It is obtained by calling Activity.getApplication(). They kept the partneme database in external storage card. And the best part is after producing output the final speech file will be deleted. For this TTS system there are total 596 sound files stored in the partneme database. Total size of the database is 1.0 Mb and application size is 2.26 Mb. The best part of this TTS system is it can read Bengali message from phones inbox and it also can generate speech by writing the Bengali word using English alphabet format. Performance And Quality Evaluation is the major part of any Application. Here the total processing time is counting from the starting time ( button is pressed to speak) to the first speech sound is pronounced. They had test the application in many ways and the output of all result is given below They have also judged their application by audience. To measure the output speech quality 5 subjects, 3 male (L1, L2, L3) and 2 female (L4, L5), are selected and their age ranging from 24 to 50. 10 original (as uttered by speaker) and modified (as uttered with android version) sentences are randomly presented for listening and their judgment in 5 point score (1=less natural 5=most natural). The result is given below. The total average score for the original sentences is 4.72 and the modified sentence is 2.88. In their paper, they describe about implementation of a Bengali speech synthesizer on a mobile device. Their goal was to develop a text-to-speech (TTS) application that can produce real time Speech. They modified several components in ESNOLA to make it run on android device. Case Study 2: The objective of a TTS engine is to convert some language Text into its spoken equivalent by a series of modules. For a better TTS engine language modeling and Speech synthesis is major units. After Studying the paper Title( Text to speech for Bangla Language using Festival) authors names (Firoj Alam , Promila Kanti Nath and Dr. Mumit Khan) we found they have used the open-source third party tool Festival TTS engine. Festival provides a frame work for building speech synthesis systems for any TTS engine. The Festival system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Festival Provides API documentation. In their TTS engine they have used two different kind of concatenative methods: unit selection and multisyn unit selection which supported in Festival. In their research they have discussed about Text Analysis, Phonetic analysis Grapheme to phoneme Conversion, Prosodic Analysis, Speech Database or Waveform Synthesis, Speech Output and Analysis of output result. The input text may come in non standard way, considering this problem they have used the text analysis part to convert all non standard words to standard words. Their grapheme-to-phoneme module produces strings of phonemic symbols based on information in the written text. Final speech synthesis is accomplished by concatenative unit selection technique and multisyn unit selection technique. In their proposed system the first step is text analysis. the job of a TTS engine is to convert the input text to equivalent Speech, for this reason the input text should convert to a standard format. There is always a chance that the input text may contain NSW (Non-Standard Word) type words. Here the author listed the NSW words as e.g. numbers (year, time, ordinal, cardinal, floating point), abbreviations, acronyms, currency, dates, URLs. They have used Text normalization for formatting NSW to SW (Standard Word) and they disambiguate the ambiguous token using rule. In their research they didnt work with Unicode directly because Festival doesnt support Unicode, So that they convert Unicode text to ASCII. In text analysis part they Split the token based on white-space and punctuation. They consider white space as a separator and Punctuation can separate the raw tokens. Festival Ordered list of tokens, each with features of white-space, and punctuation. For tokenization White-space is the most commonly used .they have identified Bangla Language have more than 10 types of NSW, so each NSW can identify as separate token by token identifier rules. They used scheme regular expression in festival to identify the token. After identifying of all NSW they convert it to standard word by pronunciation lexicon or (letter to sound) LTS rule. Pronunciation of a word sometimes doesnt match with the pronunciation form. They have solved this problem by using list of lexicon and LTS rule. They inserted 900 lexicons with its pronunciation in the lexicon dictionary. The Steps of Phonetic Analysis within festival: 1. Building large amount of lexicon. 2. Building letter-to-sound rules. They have used three techniques for concatenative synthesis: diphone, unit selection and multisyn-unit selection.They identified 45 phones excluding 31 diphthongs with their features based on articulatory analysis. To build diphone database they include diphthong as well. In their implementation they excluded the diphthongs. The duration they added is taken from Kiswahili TTS system but This is not exact duration for the phone set of Bangla language. They have approximately recorded 500-900 utterance to cover most frequent words of language. The analogy of the system was tested in two ways: in terms of acceptability/naturalness and in terms of intelligibility. Synthesized speech was evaluated on three levels: sentence level, word level and phrase level. In case of sentences level the intelligibility rate being close to 85%. On phrase level it is 83.33% and word level it is 56.66%. In their second experiment, degree of naturalness of the synthesized speech was assessed, again on sentence 90%, phrase 85% and word level 65%. The results Obtained are shown in below Figure. Case Study 3: Their model consist of three part, 1st one is LINGUISTIC MODULE what generate a linguistic representation from text. 2nd one is ACOUSTIC MODULE which generates speech from the linguistic representation. And the 3rd and final one is VISUAL MODULE which driving a talking head based on the linguistic representation. They created a relational lexical database from three source lexica: The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary, Moby Pronunciation II and COMLEX English pronouncing lexicon. There have almost entered 200,000 word, of which over 1500 are non-homophonous homographs. The interesting part of their project is they used animated image which will moved on the subject. In their Linguistic Module they token textual input and looks up word pronunciations and tags in the lexical database. Which words are not present in their lexical database they used a dynamic programming alignment algorithm that algorithm described for aligning sequences from the same alphabets. In Letter-to-sound neural network they defined features for a letter to be the union of the features of the phones that that letter might represent. When they get competitive results they thought that improved performance will come from simplifying the phonological representations found in the dictionary. By this they built a prelimi nary linguistic representation of the utterance. Then the linguistic representation submitted to a postlexical module where lexical pronunciations derived from the lexicon are converted to postlexical pronunciations typical of the speaker. They consider the distance to word, phrase, clause, and sentence boundaries was included. After converting the linguistic representation they send it to the Acoustic Module, which has three stage 1.Duration Neural Network , 2.Phonetic Neural Network and 3.Waveform Synthesizer . The acoustic module established the timing of the speech signal by associating segment duration with each phone in the linguistic representation. An acoustic representation, consist of input parameters for the synthesis portion of a vocoder, is generated for each ten-millisecond frame of speech. Finally, the synthesis portion of the vocoder is used to generate speech from these acoustic descriptions. The most interesting part of their module is that they are providing the video for the speech, so it looks like natural. And that reason they collect the animated image from the nature. The video subsystem takes the output of the linguistic module and the output of the duration neural network and generates an animated figure by using an additional neural network. Case Study 4 : Sanghamitra Mohanty has developed a very intelligent tool, which provides four Indian language Speech output at a time Hindi, Odiya, Bengali and Telegu. For all language she has considered a common system what she named Priyambada. She found Indian languages are phonetic in nature, and the progenitor phoneme mapping is linear. So the vowel and the consonant of the language are almost same except some of them. She took those in consider and apply algorithm for that. We found three stage on this TTS system. First one is Speech Corpora Creation. Here she identified speakers for four native languages, and get them in a laboratory environment using noise cancellation microphone. The sampling rate is 16 bit in single channel of 16000 Hz.By this way she collect the voice from the speakers. Secondly she creates a database for the Different Syllables from the text. She also stored individual polysyllables for different languages in a .wav file format. Finally she played the .wav files for the represented data. There she does not give the solution for the new word what is not in her present. With C++ language she developed a very interesting tool what plays very important role. Case Study 5: They actually focus to normalize the text. Most probably their work is same, their processes are tokenization, token classification, token sense disambiguation and word representation. They found some ambiguous tokens in bangla language. Like, Bangla use many language(English, Arabic, Hindi etc) in their language. the most challenging part of token are the numbers, dates, year, time, multi-text genre etc. To solve this problem they found two ways. One is to token normal bangla language and another table is to handle the ambiguous words. They levels three stage to token a word i) Tokenizer what will used to token the English and other South Asian scripts Bangla ii) Splitter is used for Punctuation and delimiter and iii) to token phone number, year, time and floating point is used Classifier. It also check the contextual rules, different form of delimiters was removed in this stage, for each type of token, regular expression were written in .jflex format all are checked in this stage. To make the ambiguous token natural this part is used for. The ambiguous words like non-natural number cardinal, ordinal, acronym, and abbreviations will sound natural. For this the used some stages. Those are (i). traverse from right to left. (ii). Map first two digits with lexicon to get the expanded form (i.e. 10 à ¢Ã¢â‚¬  Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ ten). (iii). After the expanded form of the third digit insert the token hundred. (iv). Get expanded form of each pair of digit after third digit from the lexicon. (v). Insert the token thousand after the expanded form fourth and fifth digit and lakh after expanded form of sixth and seventh digit. They will continue those stages. After each of second block they insert the token koti to make it natural By this way they believe they can make perfection of 99% of the ambiguous words. Summary of 4 case studies: Topics Case study 1 Case study 2 Case study 3 Case study 4 Case study 5 Tools ESNOLA FESTIVAL NA Priyambada JFlex Processing text type ENGLISH ASCII, UNICODE ENGLISH NOT DEFINED ENGLISH Input text type BANGLA ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH Voice source Pre recorded Pre recorded Pre recorded Pre recorded Pre recorded Total Modules 2 3 Audio format Not define Not define Not define .Wav Not define intonation Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Utterance Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Prosody Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Phonological words Yes Yes Not defined Not defined Yes Exception Handling Yes Yes No No Yes Database length 596 files Not defined 200,000 Not defined Not defined Database size 1.0 Mb Not defined Not defined Not defined Not defined Speech quality evaluation 2.88 out of 5.00 Intelligibility rate No 85% No No Yes Word Processing speed 0.45 sec/ 2 word ( no of syllable -6 ) Not defined Not defined Not defined Not defined Accuracy 57.8% 85% 87% Not define 99% for Ambiguous word [1] Frances Alias, Xavier Servillano, Joan Claudi socoro and Xavier Gonzalvo Towards High-Quality Next Generation Text-to-Speech Synthesis:A multi domain Approach by Automatic Domain Classification,IEEE Transactions on AUDIO,SPEECH AND LANGUAG PROCESSING, VOL16,NO,7 september 2008. [2] Qing Guo, Jie Zhang, Nobuyuki Katae, Hao Yu , High -Quality Prosody Generation in Mandrain Text-to-Speech system, FujiTSu Sci.Tech,J., vol.46, No.1,pp.40-46 ,2010. [3] Gopalakrishna anumanchipalli,Rahul Chitturi, Sachin Joshi, Rohit Kumar, Satinder Pal Singh,R.n.v Sitaram,D.P.Kishore, Development of Indian Language Speech Databases for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition System, [4] A.Black, H.Zen and K.Tokuda Statistical parametric speech synthesis, in proc.ICASSP, Honolulu, HI 2007, vol IV, PP 1229-1232. [5] G.Bailly, N.Campbell and b.Mobius, ISCA special session: Hot topics in speech synthesis, in proc.Eurospeech,Genea, Switzerland, 2003, pp 37-40. [6] M.Ostendorf and I.Bulyko, The impact of speech recognition on speech synthesis, in proc, IEEE Workshop Speech Synthesis, Santa Monica,2002,pp. 99-106. [7] Text To Speech Synthesis a knol by Jaibatrik Dutta . [8] Silvio Ferreia,Celina Thillou, Bernaud Gosselin, From Picture to Speech: an Innovative Application for Embedded Environment, [9] M.Nageshwara Rao, Samuel Thomas, T.Nagarajan and Hema A.Muthy, Text-to-Speech Syntheis using syllable line units [10] Jindrich Matousek, Josef Psutks, Jiri Krita, Design of speech Corpus for Text-to-Speech Synthesis. Beckman M. and Elam G. Guidelines for ToBI Labeling. Manuscript, version 3, 1997. [11] Corrigan G., Massey N., and Karaali O. Generating Segment Durations in a Text-to-Speech System: A Hybrid Rule-Based/Neural Network Approach. Proc. Eurospeech 97, Rhodes, September 1997. [12] Gerson I., Karaali O., Corrigan G., and Massey N. Neural Network Speech Synthesis. Speech Science and Technology (SST-96), Australia, 1996. [13] Karaali O., Corrigan G., and Gerson I. Speech Synthesis with Neural Networks. Invited paper, World Congress on Neural Networks (WCNN-96), San Diego, September 1996. [14] Karaali O., Corrigan G., Gerson I., and Massey N. Text-to- Speech Conversion with Neural Networks: A Recurrent TDNN Approach. Proc. Eurospeech 97, September 1997. [15] Kiparsky P. Lexical phonology and morphology. Linguistics in the morning calm, ed. by I.S. Yang. Seoul: Hanshin, 1982. [16] Kruskal J. An overview of sequence comparison. Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules, edited by Joseph Kruskal and David Sankoff. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1983. [17] Linguistic Data Consortium. COMLEX English pronouncing lexicon. Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, version 0.2, 1995. [18] Miller C., Karaali O., and Massey N. Variation and Synthetic Speech. NWAVE 26, Quebec, October 1997. [19] Nusbaum H., Francis A., and Luks T. Comparative valuation of the quality of synthetic speech produced at Motorola. Research report, Spoken Language Research Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1995. [20] OShaughnessy, D. Modeling fundamental frequency, and its relationship to syntax, semantics, and phonetics. Ph.D. thesis, M.I.T., 1976. [21] Sejnowski T. and Rosenberg C. NETtalk: a parallel network that learns to pronounce English text. Complex Systems 1.145-168, 1987. [22] Seneff S. and Zue V. Transcription and alignment of the TIMIT database. M.I.T., 1988. [23] Tuerk C. and Robinson T. Speech Synthesis using Artificial Neural Networks Trained on Cepstral Coefficients. Proc. Eurospeech 93, Berlin, September 1993. [24] Ward G. Moby Pronunciator II, 1996. [25] Weide R. The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary. cmudict.0.4, 1995.

Ottawa Valley Food Products Case Study Essay

Ottawa Valley Food Products (OVFP) is a company which manufactures and distributes low calorie and diet food items. The employees at OVFP consist of 100 production workers and 18 management and support staff. R J Jennings is amongst these individuals and has worked for OVFP for 31 years. Even though he is able to retire, Jennings does not wish to do so any time in the near future. Jennings had a previous administrative assistant, Ella Arnold, who worked with him for 10 years. Ella, aged 58, decided to take early retirement due to deterioration in her eyesight. As Jennings’ assistant, Ella would work over time sometimes without pay, go above and beyond to make sure her job was done well including breaking previous personal commitments. By Ella doing this in her job, resulted in Jennings feeling she had a ‘sixth sense’ for her job, she even ran errands in her lunch break for him. When Ella retired, the personnel department replaced her with Mary Gregory. Mary Gregory is 24 years old and has qualifications in administration from a local community college as well as a well-known Canadian university. On her first day, Jennings phoned her using the interoffice telephone to ask her to get him a coffee and a newspaper on her way back from her break. He had asked this every morning for that past ten years before Mary had joined the company. Mary refused stating she was busy. After this, Jennings got his own coffee and newspaper, even though he purposely gave Mary a light workload. From this, Jennings just assumed it was first day nerves. OVFP had an important meeting coming up with agents who did not previously transport OVFP products. The meeting was to talk about and arrange production and shipping schedules before they signed a contract. When Jennings walked into the meeting, he found Mary talking to the agents about her weekend. He had asked Mary to leave the meeting, but she refused explaining to the agents she was not leaving. After the agents left, Jennings asked Mary to visit his office where he asked for an explanation of her behaviour during the meeting. She replied with an upset comment stating ‘she was not drafted into the army.’ Another incident occurred the next morning when Mary would not file away the reports in Jennings office. Jennings had stated at the end of Mary’s six week probation period she would no longer be needed in the company. Once the news of this was found out, Jennings was later faced with a note, handed to him by Karen Russell. The note stated he had two choices, either change his mind and allow Mary to continue with her job at the end of her probation period or all 10 of OVFP’s administrative assistants would take this further. They would go to Ottawa to state their protest on the CBC show at six o’clock. The administrative assistants were waiting for Jennings response to this in the lounge and gave him 20 minutes in order to make his decision. Assumptions made based on the report: ââ€" ªThe organization was structured properly and the business is successful. The business has been running for 30 years and has a large amount of staff and managers. ââ€" ªThere are different branches or departments that produce specialized products. The different branches manage things such as dairy, vegetables and fruits and meat products ect. ââ€" ªBecause the company is so successful; all the workers have the values and objectives towards bettering the company. The workers strive toward success in the company. ââ€" ªThe company’s marketing strategy is to produce low-calorie and diet foods to grocery stores made out of high quality ingredients. Their marketing advantage is that they sell unique healthy foods at a low cost . ââ€" ªThe company has monthly goals to attain that include having the correct products ready for certain stores and having them delivered on time to the stores. They finish their work on time frequently because they have a successful business and long term customers. ââ€" ªAll of the secretaries are female. Women are specifically hired to work as secretaries for Jennings. ââ€" ªSince all of the secretaries gathered together to meet with Jennings because they were unhappy so it can be concluded that Jennings treats most of his employees unfairly and expects too much out of them. ââ€" ªJennings asks too much of his employees sometimes. He will ask them to do things that are not in their job descriptions; such as get him coffee and pick up his dry cleaning. ââ€" ªJennings may be too comfortable at his job. He is taking his employees for granted and using them to do personal favours. Problem Statement: The senior director of Ottawa Valley Food Products, R.J. Jennings, is having issues with his replacement administrative assistant. His former assistant was very outgoing and willing to work long hours in order to please her boss and to get the work done in a timely manner. When she took an early retirement, the company hired a replacement assistant for Mr. Jennings. Over her time with the company the new assistant, Mary Gregory, was at times incapable of the workload she had been given, which her predecessor had no trouble with. Not only was Mary incompetent at times, she also seemed to have no sense of proper business etiquette. On the day of an important meeting Mary decided to entertain the client with stories of her weekend while Jennings was running late. When Jennings arrived in his office he found a less than impressed client and his assistant chatting him up. After Jennings had told her to leave the office so they could commence their meeting, which was already running late, Mary scolded Jennings telling him that it was rude for him to ask her to leave and then continued with her story. After the meeting had concluded Mary was asked into Jennings’s office where he demanded an explanation. Mary protested that the situation was through no fault of her own. Mary was told shortly after the incident that her duties would no longer be needed at the end of her six week probationary period. Mary rebutted this by rallying all the administrative assistants to Mr.Jennings office with demands to be met or they would go to the CBC NEWS in Ottawa to air a piece about their story. Jennings has to make a decis ion whether or not to disregard these actions. If the piece airs on CBC NEWS, it will be nothing but bad publicity for the company. If he decides to Leave Mary in her position, she could potentially lose clients and disrupt further office interactions. Internal (Strengths and Weaknesses): Strengths ââ€" ªThe company management is well respected and the company has been running for over 30 years and supplies to grocery store. Jennings is a respected manager and has a good reputation amongst other companies that OVFP have contracts with. ââ€" ªThe Company has a high rate of employment. OVFP employs 100 production workers and 18 management and support staff. This shows that the company is successful. The company has been able to expand and needed to hire more workers to finish the required tasks on time. ââ€" ªThe Company achieves corporate objectives as they are successful in obtaining their goals. The company creates all of the goods on time and has the products delivered to certain grocers on the requested date. ââ€" ªThe company is successful because employees share the same values in the company; aiming toward success. Management ensures the job is done and that it is done with quality. The values of the workers include completing current objectives on time and with good quality. ââ€" ªThe company’s current marketing objective is to have the goods ready for their clients on time and to have the food delivered on time. This marketing objective is a strength because the employees work hard to finish the jobs. The secretaries mainly finish their assigned jobs with unfortunately some miscommunications but they work hard to finish everything. Weaknesses ââ€" ªStructure is clearly not understood by some of the employees, as Mary was not aware of some of the duties she needed to accomplish. Also, Jennings expected a lot out of her, where are she believed that she did not need complete these tasks for him because they were in her job description. Because they did not agree on what each other must do to get the day running smoothly they had a conflict. ââ€" ªThe other secretaries wanted to meet with him because they were also not happy. Jennings does not treat his secretaries fairly and expects them to work as the pace of Ella. He expects them to answer his personal calls and do other personal favours such as work overtime without pay . ââ€" ª The company does not finish all of their objectives because Mary was not completing all of the tasks Jennings assigned for her. This is why they had a conflict. ââ€" ªIf Mary could not handle the tasks Jennings was giving her then his expectations were too high. He was asking too much of her. Potentially, he could have asked for her to do simpler tasks until she got used the environment. ââ€" ªJennings did not hire Mary, human resources hired her for him. He did not have a choice therefore he may not get along with her if he doesn’t have a say in who is his secretary. The human resource department did not know what Jennings was looking for. ââ€" ªAll of the secretaries were female. If they are all only women then they are violating human rights. ââ€" ª Human resources was not able to hire an efficient worker for the company. They did not hire someone fit for the job and made a mistake. ââ€" ªJennings may not be a good manager if he is asking too much from his employees. If they do not understand where he is coming from when he is asking them to do things for him they might not listen to him. Also, if he is being unreasonable the employees won’t bother doing what they are asked. ââ€" ª Human resources may not be the appropriate people to hire an assistant for Jennings. Jennings should be able to choose his own secretary to avoid further conflict. If he picked someone that he believes would fit the job description better than there would never have been a conflict to resolve. External Analysis: Political †¢Jennings had informed Mary that she would no longer be employed at the end of her six week probationary period. Mary has no real grounds to protest for her job but the administrative assistant Union is standing up for her. With a union involved, striking is always a possibility. The administrative assistants to a large load of the office work and filing. Without these workers the business will be running far less efficiently. Social †¢The way Ottawa Valley Food Products is perceived by the public is directly correlated to its sales. A local news piece that depicts the company in a negative image could have negative repercussions on the success of the company. Sometimes there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but if the company looks like it doesn’t care about its employees, that is tougher for the company to shake. Opportunities †¢With the administrative assistants up in arms, an opportunity has arisen to change the current hiring system. To ensure that no incidents happen in the future, it is possible to tweak our hiring techniques to make sure our employees are of a quality caliber and they have solid references. Jennings is however not the root of the problem, Mary is, and management should be looking seriously into this as well. The management of a corporation should not allow an administrative assistant to potentially ruin sales and lose the company money and clients. Threats †¢The threat of a unionized support staff is always looming. If the administrative assistants form a union it will be nearly impossible to fire unruly staff. Also unions usually bargain for more money, which would result in more overhead for the company. Ultimately a union would limit the amount of work that the assistants do, and give them more money. If the Assistants were to form a union, it could have direct correlation with the production of the company. †¢A new hiring standard is in desperate need at Ottawa Valley Food Products. Otherwise they run the risk of hiring more staff that could become problematic. If they continue to hire these types of staff, it could have detrimental effects on the productivity of the company. Alternatives courses of Action: Alternative #1 R.J can do nothing and continue to end Mary’s employment after the six – week probation period. This will force the 10 OVFP executive assistants to publicize their complaint on CBC. R.J. Jennings is a senior manager at OVFP who has been working with them for 31 years and Mary Gregory should treat him with respect and honor his requests. Advantages †¢R.J. Jennings has been employed at OVFP for 31 years and deserves a better administrative assistant. By continuing to terminate Mary’s employment he may be assigned an assistant that better meets his needs. †¢The cost of finding and training new employees with work equipment can end up being expensive but Mary wasn’t able to handle the duties necessary to be a successful assistant. The potential employees applying for the job can be strategically chosen through interviews so that time and money is not wasted if they hire a new assistant with extensive experience that can adapt to the new job easily and not require lots of training. †¢This option is easy to put into practice because nothing is required other than to document Mary Gregory’s progress until the six – week probation period has ended. During this period R.J. also is given enough time to search for and hire a new assistant that may better meet his needs. †¢By executing this option R.J. is also able to demonstrate his expectations to other coworkers. In future situations his coworkers will know what R.J. expects from his assistants. Disadvantages †¢By continuing to terminate Mary’s employment he will lose his assistant as well as having the potential to lose the other 10 executive assistants that are protesting this. As these other assistants do not agree with R.J.’s decision they may willingly quit. As well, by going public with this protest they can bring negative media attention to R.J. and OVFP, as thus may ruin future business deals or current business commitments. †¢The approach of doing nothing and continuing to end Mary’s employment after the six – week probation period could negatively affect the company. The company will now have to go through the trouble of hiring and training a new assistant, rather than to address and try to fix the problem with Mary. If R.J. does need to replace Mary and possibly other executive assistants, he may replace them with new employees that might not work out and in fact be worse than his current employees. †¢If R.J. does terminate Mary’s employment, lose other executive assistance and bring negative media attention to OVFP he also has the potential of losing his job. Other senior management might view him as harmful to the company and may look into putting him on a probationary period or ultimately terminating his position. Alternative #2 R.J. Jennings could bring Mary Gregory into his office and have a discussion about the situation and address the problems that he has with Mary. Allow Mary to see what Ella Arnold successfully did and how she completed her tasks for R.J. daily. R.J. also clearly needs to express his expectations for his assistant so Mary is able to understand what is required of her. R.J. can allow Mary to move forward from this point and demonstrate how she is qualified for this job. If she is given another chance she may meet his standards and adjust to being a successful assistant. R.J. may also be given the opportunity to see his demands from Mary’s perspective. Because Ella did tasks for R.J that was not in her job description, R.J. has come to expect this. Mary can be given the chance to explain that she is not there to bring R.J. his coffee and newspaper and how she felt at some of his requests. Advantages †¢The actual problem can be addressed and Mary can see what Ella Arnold did as R.J.’s assistant. Mary will be given a list of expectations that she must meet in order to continue her employment at OVFP. If Mary clearly knows what is expected of her she may be able to carry out her daily tasks successfully. If Mary does not agree with what is expected of her in this role or does not feel she can complete such tasks she may willing leave her position, without spurring the negative media attention. †¢R.J. is also given the opportunity to see how much more Ella did for him that was required. Mary may have a different work style than Ella and does not feel like she should have to be taken advantage of or do tasks that R.J. can carry out himself, such as getting R.J. his coffee. †¢This alternative allows the problem to be addressed between both parties. It can also promote further open communication between coworkers as R.J. is setting a positive example to address a problem. †¢Negative media attention can be avoided as the executive assistants will not be on the CBC newscast. Disadvantages †¢Mary Gregory might become defensive once in R.J.’s office. After R.J. addresses the problem with Mary she might have a different perspective on the situation and feel she isn’t in the wrong. R.J. may feel he has wasted time and effort trying to fix the problem with Mary. †¢If Mary does not agree with R.J. she might notify the other 10 OVFP executive assistants about the meeting she had and continue with the CBC newscast. If Mary does not agree with the discussion she had with R.J. it could fuel further negative comments being made during the newscast. †¢Mary might feel she is underappreciated because she’s always being compared to Ella. Alternative #3 Terminate Mary Gregory from OVFP as an assistant immediately without reason and without allowing the six-week probation period to expire. Mary has been given enough chances to complete what is required of her and if she still continues to struggle with the everyday tasks that R.J. assigns then she is not the right person for the assistant position. Advantages †¢Mary Gregory is no longer an employee for OVFP so they can start to find a replacement assistant immediately that can be beneficial to the company. †¢It will be easier to release Mary as an employee because she’s still on probation. †¢R.J. Jennings can get back to being an efficient, hardworking employee with no distractions to affect his work. He can find a new assistant that meets his needs and will allow him to continue to be a dedicated employee. †¢Because Mary was new to the company she does not get paid benefits or other possible layoff payments that a fulltime life employee would receive. Disadvantages †¢Employees that formed a bond or friendship with Mary might disagree with OVFP’s choice to terminate her during the probation period. These employees might show their disagreement with the company’s choice by slowing work efficiency and motivation towards their job. †¢The assistants that have threatened to appear on CBC will still do so if Mary is immediately terminated. The immediate termination may infuriate them further if Mary is fired without being given any explanation or chance to further prove her work ethic. †¢Employees might take the message in a different manner and think there not being treated fairly for the work they give to the company. The employees might think that the company feels they are replaceable and aren’t an asset towards the company’s success when that isn’t the case. This could lead to further problems such as strikes or searching for other employment. †¢Time and money will be spent during the process of finding a new assistant. Alternative #4 Allow the option to release Mary Gregory from OVFP as an assistant with reason. Again, Mary has been given ample opportunities to turn her work ethic around but has failed to do so. R.J could have a meeting and tell Mary she is no longer employed at OVFP as well as notify her of the reasons why she’s being let go. This can allow R.J. to clearly express his reasoning for the decision as well as allow Mary to express how she is feeling Advantages †¢R.J. would no longer have to work with an assistant he feels does not meet up to his standards. †¢By having a meeting and clearly explaining the reason for her termination it may diffuse the situation. Mary can be given the opportunity to see R.J.’s reasoning and may agree with some of the issues he has raised. It can also be a learning experience for Mary as she looks for new jobs she may know what is expected of her in an administrative position. †¢Mary can be given the opportunity for a fresh start at a new company. She may also be able to use R.J. as a reference or connection toother jobs. Although her job was terminated R.J. may want to help her future search and just cite the termination as a clash of personalities or Mary not being the right fit for the job. R.J. is also able to have a fresh start with a new assistant and may be more aware of how to express his expectations. †¢R.J.’s executive assistants will not go on CBC if Mary has been treated with respect and had the opportunity to have a discussion with R.J. Disadvantages †¢Negative publicity can still arise if Mary still feels she wasn’t treated equally and was terminated without given a fair chance. The other assistants may feel that it is still necessary to make this issue aware to the public by being on CBC. †¢Legal issues may be a possibility. Even though she’s a new employee she could address the situation with the labor board or human resources to see if there are any options regarding her termination (i.e. severance pay). †¢Disagreement with the decision to terminate Mary’s position by other employees might cause work ethic and efficiency to drop or other possibilities such as a strike or employees quitting. Recommendations and Plan of Action: The alternative chosen to resolve the problem statement is option four which is allowing the option to release Mary Gregory from OVFP as an assistant with reason. This alternative is favourable as Mary has been given numerous amounts of opportunities to adjust her work attitude, still chooses not to do so. By choosing this alternative, Jennings could have a meeting with Mary and explain to her why she is no longer an employee of OVFP. At this meeting, he is able to discuss the reasons to why she is being fired. Jennings will be able to justify his decision and let Mary express her feelings about the situation. By using this alternative Jennings will no longer have to work with Mary as he feels her work ethics are not to his standards of being his assistant. As a result of having this meeting, it can calm the situation as Mary is able to understand Jennings’ reasoning and may even agree with some of the issues he states. This could also allow Mary to learn from this when she looks for future jobs as she may have a better understanding of what is expected of her in an administrative assistant’s role. As a result of Mary’s termination this will allow her to have a new start with a different company. Finally, if Mary is treated with respect and given justification to her termination, the executive assistants may change their mind and withdraw from appearing on CBC. There were a number of different alternatives decided upon as well when analysing Mary Gregory’s position at OVFP. The first alternative for Jennings to do nothing and to continue to end Mary’s employment after her six weeks probation period would not be suitable. This is due to ten other OVFP executive assistants stating they would also leave the company if Mary was not employed after her probation period. They also stated they would publicise their complaint on CBC. This could result in bringing negative publicity to OVFP, which could potentially cause problems with future business deals or current business relationships. Also, by terminating Mary’s employment the company would have to go through the process of finding a new assistant for Jennings and then having to train them. By doing this, OVFP may find these new employees to not be as efficient as their previous executive assistants. Finally, Jennings may lose his own job by bringing negative media attention to the business from firing Mary and the other assistants going to CBC with their disagreements. OVFP senior management team may find this damaging to the company and its image, therefore possibly putting him on a probationary period or terminating his position altogether. The second alternative, Jennings bringing Mary into his office to discuss the situation and address any problems is also not suitable for resolving this issue. This is could result in Mary becoming defensive once Jennings begins to discuss issues with her. She might feel she is not in the wrong and have a different outlook on the situation at hand. As a result of this, Jennings may feel he has wasted his time trying to resolve the problems with Mary and her work attitude. Also, Mary might speak with other assistants once she finishes talking with Jennings and explain to them what happened. After this, they may still continue with the broadcast with CBC and if Mary does not agree with Jennings and his opinions then this could result in even more negative comments said during the newscast, again bringing destructive media attention to OVFP. Also, by Jennings doing this Mary feel unappreciated as he is always comparing her to his previous assistant, Ella Arnold. This could demotivate he r to completing her job to the best of her ability and carrying out everyday tasks Ella used to do for Jennings. Finally, the third alternative is terminating Mary from OVFP as an assistant without reason and terminating her position once her six week probation period has finished. This, again, would not be appropriate for resolving the situation as employees who have formed a working or friendly relationship with Mary might disagree with OVFP’s decision. By showing their support towards Mary, they may decide to show lack of care within their working attitudes and not complete their own jobs properly. This could bring a long, tiring issue for OVFP if their employees are not motivated to work and complete their jobs on time or to the highest of standards. Also, the assistants who mentioned they would appear on CBC will continue to do so if Mary is fired from her position. They may do this as they will be upset by Mary being terminated without any justification to why she is no longer needed at OVFP. Also, from this alternative employees may feel they are not being treated fairly for the work they contribute towards the company, therefore they may feel they are replaceable. As a result of this, employees will not feel an asset to the company or feel they are appreciated when the company achieves goals. Employees could strike due to this or seek employment in a different company. Finally, precious time and money will be wasted on finding new assistants to replace Mary and the ten executive assistants if they decide to leave OVFP. The response that Mary’s and the other executive assistants gave when they hear the news that Mary is being let go after her probation period may seem like the major key component in this case. But as stated is this report there are many other factors that play into this company problem. Mary may response in an understandings way when Jennings explains his reasoning for letting her go from OVFP or she may not. Either way OVFP must realise they need to make changes in the company to prevent a situation like this from happening in the future. Reorganizing the human resources hiring process is a great start. Job posting that clearly state what the employee duties are within the company, will avoid confuse among Mangers and assistants. Also having Managers involved in the hiring of their assistants with make sure that Managers are paired with assistants that meet there individual needs. Having Human Recourse make these changes, it will over all avoid future problems like this from arising, and will create happier for efficient, and loyal employees. Which will o ver all benefits the company with loyal employees more efficient employees the company will save money and put this money in things such as expanding or improving other components.

Memorable Event

Memorable event Life is full of unexpected events that leave a glimpse of lingering within a person’s heart; it could be unforgettable history, unpredictable present, or mystery future. No matter what will happen, everything will eventually have an effect which will remain forever or dissolve in their memory. When remembering an event, people tend to reflect about their past instead of heartbreaking events. Notwithstanding, several incidents such as my aunt passing away, my mother’s health, and my friend Diego, both tragically and glamorous, influenced me as the most remarkable event thus far within my life.Several weeks ago, I received news from Vietnam that instantly astounded me. My aunt had her last breath and departed from this world. My aunt was a drug addict; although, she always taught me moral values of life and how to be a responsible adult. Since I acknowledge this world, she was a charismatic model for me to pursue while I was still a young, immature kid. Ne vertheless, I had changed over the years and wasted my time with others on the streets without realizing the significance of education.Fortunately, she had not abandoned me; she took herself as a demonstration for the consequence of being a drug user and how she’s regretted being in jail without seeing her father the last time. It was her, who convinced me to be a conscientious person again. When I migrated to the U. S. , I had a promise that I would continue my education, no matter how complicated it can be. Comparatively to my aunt’s news, my mother’s health condition turned worse; however, she managed to continue to work on her job due to an explicit fact that if she had no stable finance, she would not able to pay her monthly rent and utilities.More importantly, my brothers and I will not able to concentrate on our education. Not long ago, I looked back at my mother, she had changed a lot. Her grayish hair had frightened me. I was apprehensive that her heart condition would seize her from me. Instead of being petrified for herself, she generously smiled and comforted me with the idea of â€Å"being optimistic† in life. Albeit, her difficulty seemed to improve a little, I always used this event as a reminder to myself that I have to be stronger to protect my mother in the future.Meanwhile, my encounter with Diego last year in Alhambra High School was a convivial occasion. Initially, due to a dissimilar language I became anti-social when it came to speaking. Over the years, I preferred working alone no matter what project I had in class until collaboration with Diego. We worked on a presentation for my Gifted class where we had to spend time together in the library to complete the project. With the purpose to strive for the best, both of us displayed our skills and comprehended the project’s purpose thoroughly. We achieved an excellent score in class which made me really glad.Diego was the first one to teach me the signific ance to interconnect with friends which would improve on my communicative skills when it came to discussion. After getting to know Diego, I transformed into an outgoing person and allowed myself to work with others. Even though these events happened in the past, it left an impact deeply within me. Each confrontation taught me to be more mature, unyielding toward difficulties, and working together with friends. I believed regarding to what will occur in the future; I would never forget these moments that had alternated me into a mature teenager.

Federal Qualified Public Health Clinic - 1223 Words

Background Statement: Federal Qualified Public Health Clinic (FQPH) is experiencing an organizational break down. Many of FQPH patients are recipients of Medicaid and SCHIP, or uninsured self-pay clients as it is located in a large Northwestern City. The physicians are frustrated with current conditions. As a last-ditch effort, they inform Administrator of their complaints that need immediate attention or they will terminate employment. Those complaints include inadequate paper medical records; inefficient patient registration practices; mean and slow employees; mistreatment of patients and medical staff; inadequate staff; disorganization of medical supplies and medications; untimely lab results; unclean facility; and unsafe parking.†¦show more content†¦Medical records are not electronic, but paper, which causes them to become lost or misfiled. Physicians need readily access to patient records so they can treat patients effectively. The secondary issues are lack of clearly defined roles. The physicians’ primary role is to provide patient care; however, the physicians are performing administrative duties such as scheduling clinic coverage and maintaining adequate medical supplies in examination rooms. Such task should be assigned to administrative assistants. Undefined employee roles create problems because some tasks remain unfinished. Another secondary issue is the weakened employee expectations and employee performance, which adversely affects good patient care as well. The person in charge of patient registration is unprofessional to staff and patients. The facility is not clean because maintenance is slow in performing assigned duties. The parking is unsafe and unattended. The staff lacks the motivation to perform well. Your Role As administrator of the clinic, I oversee the daily operations of the clinic. The advantage of being the administrator is that I can implement the necessary changes. The disadvantage of being the administrator is that the burden falls on me to ensure the organizational structure is solid and functional from lower level to upper level positions. Often administrators cannot to be the eyes on the floor