This post was co-authored by @Qinying Liao, @Anny Dow , Yueying Liu, and Peter Pan.  

Neural TTS enables fluid, natural-sounding speech that matches the patterns and intonation of human voices, helping developers bring their solutions to life.

Today, we’re building upon our Neural Text to Speech (Neural TTS) capabilities in Azure Cognitive Services with new voice styles. With the new styles—newscast, customer service, and digital assistant—developers can tailor the voice of their apps and services to fit their brand or unique scenario.

Built on a powerful base model, our neural TTS voices are very natural, reliable, and expressive. Through transfer learning, the neural TTS model can learn different speaking styles from various speakers, enabling nuanced voices.

In addition to our new voice styles optimized for specific scenarios, we are also releasing new emotion styles. These styles allow you to adjust voices to express different emotions to fit the context, like cheerfulness or empathy. Let’s dive in.

Introducing Newscast, Customer Service, and Digital Assistant styles

Newscast

With neural TTS voices in the newscast style, your users can enjoy listening to news or articles in a professional tone that reflects what you might hear on TV or radio newscasts.

Hear Aria’s (English – Female) and Xiaoxiao’s (Chinese – Female) voices in the newscast style:

Check out the newscast style in the Bing mobile app. When you search news with the voice search feature, you can hear news briefs using Aria’s newscast style voice.

You can also check out Xiaoxiao’s newscast style voice, which has been adopted in WeChat through the Microsoft Listening Docs app. In Microsoft Listening Docs, users can hear Xiaoxiao’s voice read out multiple document types such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, as well as images. Users can easily generate audio content for online trainings, news podcasts and more, and share with their social circles.

Customer Service

The customer service style features a friendly and engaging tone and is suitable for scenarios involving customer support, such as an individual checking into their flight, making a restaurant reservation, or reporting a claim.

Hear Aria’s and Xiaoxiao’s voices in the customer service style:

Digital Assistant

Many customers have been using neural TTS voices for their digital assistant solutions. We are introducing two styles in this area: a chat style for more casual, conversational bots, and a more professional style for scenarios such as in-car digital assistants.

The chat style features a conversational tone, simulating casual dialogue.

Hear Aria’s voice in the chat style:

The assistant style features a friendly and helpful tone, which is suitable in scenarios such as smart speakers or in-car assistants. Use the digital assistant voice to hear the weather forecast, search for information, navigate directions, set reminders, and more.

Hear Xiaoxiao’s voice in the assistant style:

Bringing new emotions to Neural Text to Speech

To enable you to build nuanced voices for your unique scenario, Neural Text to Speech also offers different emotion styles. You can access cheerful and empathetic styles for Aria’s voice, lyrical style for Xiaoxiao’s voice—which sounds heartfelt and is optimized to read prose or poetry, and cheerful style for Francisca’s voice (Brazilian Portuguese).

Hear the new styles below:

These new voice styles are also available for customized brand voices through our Custom Neural Voice capability, allowing you to build a unique voice that can also benefit from our new scenario and emotion styles. As part of Microsoft’s commitment to designing AI responsibly, we have developed guidelines for customers in using Custom Neural Voice, in alignment with Microsoft’s principles for responsible innovation in AI. Learn more about the process for getting started with Custom Neural Voice here.

Get Started

Get started with the new neural TTS voice styles available in Azure Cognitive Services. Check out our documentation to learn more.

In Linux, dotfiles are hidden text files that are used to store various configuration settings for many such as Bash and Git to more complex applications like i3 or VSCode.

Most of these files are contained in the ~/.config directory or right in the home directory. Editing these files allows you to customize applications beyond what a settings menu may provide, and they tend to be portable across devices and even other Linux distributions. But one talking point across the Linux enthusiast community is how to manage these dotfiles and how to share them.

We will be showcasing a tool called Chezmoi that does this task a little differently from the others.

The history of dotfile management

If you search GitHub for dotfiles, what you will see are over 100k repositories after one goal: Store people’s dotfiles in a shareable and repeatable manor. However, other than using git, they store their files differently.

While Git has solved code management problems that also translates to config file management, It does not solve how to separate between distributions, roles (such as home vs work computers) secrets management, and per device configuration.

Because of this, many users decide to craft their own solutions, and the community has responded with multiple answers over the years. This article will briefly cover some of the solutions that have been created.

Experiment in an isolated environment

Do you want to try these below solutions quickly in a contained environment? Run:

$ podman run --rm -it fedora

… to create a Fedora container to try the applications in. This container will automatically delete itself when you exit the shell.

The install problem

If you store your dotfiles in Git repository, you will want to make it easy for your changes to automatically be applied inside your home directory, the easiest way to do this at first glance is to use a symlink, such as ln -s ~/.dotfies/bashrc ~/.bashrc. This will allow your changes to take place instantly when your repository is updated.

The problem with symlinks is that managing symlinks can be a chore. Stow and RCM (covered here on Fedora Magazine) can help you manage those, but these are not seamless solutions. Files that are private will need to be modified and chmoded properly after download. If you revamp your dotfiles on one system, and download your repository to another system, you may get conflicts and require troubleshooting.

Another solution to this problem is writing your own install script. This is the most flexible option, but has the tradeoff of requiring more time into building a custom solution.

The secrets problem

Git is designed to track changes. If you store a secret such as a password or an API key in your git repository, you will have a difficult time and will need to rewrite your git history to remove that secret. If your repository is public, your secret would be impossible to recover if someone else has downloaded your repository. This problem alone will prevent many individuals from sharing their dotfiles with the public world.

The multi-device config problem

The problem is not pulling your config to multiple devices, the problem is when you have multiple devices that require different configuration. Most individuals handle this by either having different folders or by using different forks. This makes it difficult to share configs across the different devices and role sets

How Chezmoi works

Chezmoi is a tool to manage your dotfiles with the above problems in mind, it doesn’t blindly copy or symlink files from your repository. Chezmoi acts more like a template engine to generate your dotfiles based on system variables, templates, secret managers, and Chezmoi’s own config file.

Getting Started with Chezmoi

Currently Chezmoi is not in the default repositories. You can download the current version of Chezmoi as of writing with the following command.

$ sudo dnf install https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/relea...x86_64.rpm

This will install the pre-packaged RPM to your system.

Lets go ahead and create your repository using:

$ chezmoi init

It will create your new repository in ~/.local/share/chezmoi/. You can easily cd to this directory by using:

$ chezmoi cd

Lets add our first file:

chezmoi add ~/.bashrc 

… to add your bashrc file to your chezmoi repository.

Note: if your bashrc file is actually a symlink, you will need to add the -f flag to follow it and read the contents of the real file.

You can now edit this file using:

$ chezmoi edit ~/.bashrc

Now lets add a private file, This is a file that has the permissions 600 or similar. I have a file at .ssh/config that I would like to add by using

$ chezmoi add ~/.ssh/config

Chezmoi uses special prefixes to keep track of what is a hidden file and a private file to work around Git’s limitations. Run the following command to see it:

$ chezmoi cd

Do note that files that are marked as private are not actually private, they are still saved as plain text in your git repo. More on that later.

You can apply any changes by using:

$ chezmoi apply

and inspect what is different by using

$ chezmoi diff

Using variables and templates

To export all of your data Chezmoi can gather, run:

$ chezmoi data

Most of these are information about your username, arch, hostname, os type and os name. But you can also add our own variables.

Go ahead and run:

$ chezmoi edit-config

… and input the following:

[data] email = "fedorauser@example.com" name = "Fedora Mcdora"

Save your file and run chezmoi data again. You will see on the bottom that your email and name are now added. You can now use these with templates with Chezmoi. Run:

$ chezmoi add -T --autotemplate ~/.gitconfig

… to add your gitconfig as a template into Chezmoi. If Chezmoi is successful in inferring template correctly, you could get the following:

[user] email = "{{ .email }}" name = "{{ .name }}"

If it does not, you can change the file to this instead.

Inspect your file with:

$ chezmoi edit ~/.gitconfig

After using

$ chezmoi cat ~/.gitconfig

… to see what chezmoi will generate for this file. My generated example is below:

[root@a6e273a8d010 ~]# chezmoi cat ~/.gitconfig [user] email = "fedorauser@example.com" name = "Fedora Mcdora" [root@a6e273a8d010 ~]# 

It will generate a file filled with the variables in our chezmoi config.
You can also use the varibles to perform simple logic statements. One example is:

{{- if eq .chezmoi.hostname "fsteel" }}

# this will only be included if the host name is equal to "fsteel"

{{- end }}

Do note that for this to work the file has to be a template. You can check this by seeing if the file has a “.tmpl” appended to its name on the file in chezmoi cd, or by readding the file using the -T option

Keeping secrets… secret

To troubleshoot your setup, use the following command.

$ chezmoi doctor 

What is important here is that it also shows you the password managers it supports.

[root@a6e273a8d010 ~]# chezmoi doctor warning: version dev ok: runtime.GOOS linux, runtime.GOARCH amd64 ok: /root/.local/share/chezmoi (source directory, perm 700) ok: /root (destination directory, perm 550) ok: /root/.config/chezmoi/chezmoi.toml (configuration file) ok: /bin/bash (shell) ok: /usr/bin/vi (editor) warning: vimdiff (merge command, not found) ok: /usr/bin/git (source VCS command, version 2.25.1)

 ok: /usr/bin/gpg (GnuPG, version 2.2.18) warning: op (1Password CLI, not found) warning: bw (Bitwarden CLI, not found) warning: gopass (gopass CLI, not found) warning: keepassxc-cli (KeePassXC CLI, not found) warning: lpass (LastPass CLI, not found) warning: pass (pass CLI, not found) warning: vault (Vault CLI, not found) [root@a6e273a8d010 ~]# 

You can use either of these clients, or a generic client, or your system’s Keyring.

For GPG, you will need to add the following to your config using:

$ chezmoi edit-config

[gpg] recipient = "<Your GPG keys Recipient"

You can use:

$ chezmoi add --encrypt

… to add any files, these will be encrypted in your source respository and not exposed to the public world as plain text. Chezmoi will automatically decrypt them when applying.

We can also use them in templates. For example, a secret token stored in Pass (covered on Fedora Magazine). Go ahead and generate your secret.

In this example, it’s called “githubtoken”:

rwaltr@fsteel:~] $ pass ls Password Store └── githubtoken [rwaltr@fsteel:~] $ 

Next, edit your template, such as your .gitconfig we created earlier and add this lines.

token = {{ pass "githubtoken" }}

Then lets inspect using:

$ chezmoi cat ~/.gitconfig

[rwaltr@fsteel:~] $ chezmoi cat ~/.gitconfig This is Git's per-user configuration file. [user] name = Ryan Walter email = rwalt@pm.me token = mysecrettoken [rwaltr@fsteel:~] $ 

Now your secrets are properly secured in your password manager, your config can be publicly shared without risk!

Final notes

This is only scratching the surface. Please check out Chezmoi’s website for more information. The author also has his dotfiles public if you are looking for more examples on how to use Chezmoi.

For a long time now, Nintendo fans have been crying out for themed LEGO sets based on their favourite video games. While Super Mario probably wasn’t the number one request, that’s how this collaboration between the two famous companies will begin.

Right now, apart from the initial reveal, there’s been nothing officially mentioned about a price or release date for these upcoming Mario themed sets. Now, though, GoNintendo has supposedly received a tip from a “Target Insider” about this new line. Here’s the full rundown:

According to Target’s internal systems, we can expect LEGO Super Mario to make its debut in August 2020. The listing right now says Aug. 1st, 2020, but we’re not sure if that’s placeholder. Along with that, the listing is for the starter set in particular, which is priced at $70. No details on what’s included in that, or if other sets will launch the same day.

Keep in mind, there is nothing concrete about this information, and it’s far from an official announcement. Still, an August launch sounds feasible – so we guess we’ll just have to wait and find out. In the meantime, you can learn more about this new LEGO theme in the original announcement post.

Does this Mario LEGO interest you? What other Nintendo sets would you like to see? Leave a comment down below.

Earlier this week, we heard some rumours about the potential revival of multiple Mario games. One, in particular, was Paper Mario. While many fans would love to see it return to form, what would it be like if Nintendo decided to turn one of its other major franchises into a paper-crafted RPG experience?

On 2nd April, the YouTube channel 64 Bits revealed an incredible trailer for its own concept, Paper Zelda. In a nutshell, it’s a look at what The Legend of Zelda series would be like with a Paper Mario template applied. The video below brings to life a number of scenes from various Zelda games – including the Breath of the Wild sequel – while also showcasing how the RPG mechanics and world map would operate.

As you can see there are some iconic moments from games such as Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker and A Link to the Past. We think the style and overall look of this trailer absolutely nails it, but admittedly we’re not so sure how well the Zelda series would fit with the Paper Mario design in terms of gameplay (especially after the open-world adventure Breath of the Wild). In saying this, we won’t be complaining if Nintendo does ever decide to release a paper crafted Zelda title like this one in the future.

What do you think of the above trailer? Have you thought about a Zelda Paper Mario game like this before? Tell us below.

Your Legacy continues#RogueLegacy2 pic.twitter.com/uUGeLE9TPm

— CellarDoorGames (@CellarDoorGames) April 2, 2020

It’s critical when we’re facing crises that we protect our core values, including democracy. Democracies were already facing adversaries intent on using cyberattacks to disrupt our elections and democratic processes. Now, as the world battles the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen, and others have reported, that nation states and cybercriminals are taking advantage of the crisis by using virus-themed phishing attacks and other techniques to attack critical institutions. We must assume they will use these techniques to target our elections as well.

Today, we are announcing several steps our Defending Democracy program is taking to help our democratic processes become more resilient in light of all these threats. First, starting today, we’re expanding our Defending Democracy Program to include a new service, Election Security Advisors, which will give political campaigns and election officials hands-on help securing their systems and recovering from cyberattacks. Second, we are expanding our AccountGuard threat notification service to cover the offices of U.S. election officials and the U.S. Congress as many are working remotely. Third, we are extending Microsoft 365 for Campaigns to state-level campaigns and parties. And, finally, we are publishing our public policy recommendations for securing elections, including ways to secure them while confronting the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Introducing Election Security Advisors

Today, as part of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, we’re announcing a new service called Election Security Advisors, bringing Microsoft’s cybersecurity preparedness and remediation expertise to election officials and political campaigns. Through Election Security Advisors, campaigns and election officials will be able to choose from two offerings from Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team (DART). The first is an assessment of an organization’s systems and then providing expert help in configuring them securely to close any security gaps. The second is an incident response service helping these organizations find the cause of an attack, root it out and provide the direction required to restore their systems.

Microsoft founded the DART team in 2012 to provide proactive and reactive incident response and resiliency services to customers with the most challenging security needs, including investigation and remediation following attacks. The team currently includes a variety of cybersecurity experts including forensic investigators, reverse engineers and crisis experts across more than 33 cities on five continents who are able to rapidly deploy to customers around the world. These experts have been on the cyber front lines, addressing hundreds of incidents in 52 countries, spanning 26 industries and numerous government agencies. We published a case study of the team’s work today here.

Election Security Advisors is available today to all campaigns for federal office in the United States, state and local election officials, and private vendors serving the campaign and election community. These services have been packaged especially for the needs of the campaign and election community and will be priced significantly lower than comparable services for enterprises. We are also examining ways to bring these services to other democracies in the future. Those eligible for Election Security Advisors can learn more by emailing Protect2020@microsoft.com.

AccountGuard expansion

Since we announced our AccountGuard threat notification service in August 2018, we’ve expanded it to political campaigns, parties and democracy-focused non-profits in 29 countries around the world. It now protects more than 90,000 accounts. Starting today, AccountGuard is now also available to members of U.S. Congress and their staff as well as state election officials across the country, and sign up is available here. As many of these officials and their staff are engaging in their duties while working remotely, we hope this extra layer of security will help.

AccountGuard is a free service that notifies organizations of cyberattacks, tracking threat activity across email systems run by organizations as well as the personal accounts of its employees who opt-in. It’s open to Office 365 customers and can track threats targeting Microsoft’s consumer email services, including Outlook.com and Hotmail.  More on AccountGuard is available in our August 2018 announcement here. AccountGuard also includes access to cybersecurity training, and we’ve trained more than 1,500 campaign staffers and consultants on cybersecurity to date.

Microsoft 365 for Campaigns expansion

As we’ve continued to engage with those involved in the democratic process, one thing we hear routinely is that enterprise-grade email and filesharing services with world-class security are often too expensive for campaigns or are too difficult to set up and manage. Based on this feedback, last summer, we announced Microsoft 365 for Campaigns, bringing our best and most secure email services to political campaigns at the federal level.

Starting today, we’re bringing Microsoft 365 for Campaigns to anyone running for political office and political committees at the state level in the U.S., including those running for state legislatures and gubernatorial races. Those wishing to sign up can do so here. As campaigns and committees think about working remotely to support upcoming elections, we believe this will give them the world-class productivity, email, file-sharing and conferencing tools to do so in a way that’s affordable, easy to use and secure. Microsoft 365 for Campaigns provides the features of Microsoft 365 Business to these customers at a low price and with setup tools that help enable any campaign staffer to configure it securely for a campaign environment in about five minutes.

Policy recommendations

Today, we also published a set of policy recommendations and suggested actions government can take to secure the election system, including recommendations for conducting secure elections while addressing the need for social distancing to fight COVID-19.

To accommodate the possible need for social distancing leading into the November 2020 U.S. elections, Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program is urging governments to

• Look at options like increasing access to absentee voting
• Enable curbside or portable voting solutions.

To enable absentee voting, states can, for example, waive the requirement that voters submit a reason for requesting an absentee ballot and allow people to request an absentee ballot online. Portable or curbside voting solutions, which exist today mainly to accommodate people with disabilities, should be expanded, which will require new tools like e-pollbooks that can ensure voters are eligible without being tied to a single polling place.

While COVID-19 is a new and unexpected threat to U.S. elections, it is certainly not the only one. Challenges of nation-state interference and concerns about the security of election systems were already at the forefront of many officials’ minds going into this year. To address this, the policy recommendations also lay out five specific suggestions for securing the elections in general:

• A paper trail should be required for all elections
• Election results should be confirmed through post-election audits
• Elections should be end-to-end verifiable, meaning voters and members of the public should be able to confirm the accuracy of results
• Consistent funding needs to be provided by the federal government, so that state and local officials know when they purchase new technology that they’ll have funds to keep it secure through updates and improvements
• Everyone impacted by cyber threats, including the election community needs to be part of the discussion about changing what’s considered acceptable behavior in cyberspace by joining multi-stakeholder initiatives like the Paris Peace Call for Trust & Security in Cyberspace

Of course, we don’t have all the answers, but we’re sharing these recommendations based on what we’ve seen as we’ve tried to offer new technologies to the community and based on discussions with other technology providers, election officials and the academic community. We hope others offer their suggestions and contribute to the conversation.

In closing, there’s one important note about today’s AccountGuard and Microsoft 365 for Campaigns news. Due to local regulations, we are currently unable to offer AccountGuard to state election departments or M365 for Campaigns in the following states at this time: Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Wyoming. We encourage customers in those states to explore additional offerings here. In many cases, it’s law or regulation – not technical capability – that is preventing us from helping to secure democratic institutions as much as possible. We’ve been pleased that so many government officials around the world have worked collaboratively with us to break down existing barriers, and we’ll continue to work with government officials to find solutions.

Tags: COVID-19, Election Security Advisors, ElectionGuard, elections, Microsoft 365 for Campaigns, Microsoft AccountGuard

Over the last few weeks, the world at large has taken on many new challenges in daily life. Adopting new ways to work from home, often while parenting and balancing other priorities. It takes time, patience and problem solving. It’s like learning a new language.

We have received questions from across the disability community looking for tools, resources and best practices. Below you’ll see some of our key learnings since transitioning to working from home in early March. We have identified ways to accelerate the learning curve by leaning into our employees expertise and by continuing to prioritize accessibility to ensure that what we deliver is accessible to all our colleagues in these new and shifting circumstances.

Consider this the start of a series with more chapters ahead. Our hope is that by sharing these learnings we can accelerate your new your journey of being accessible, inclusive and productive – no matter where you’re working.

Learn from others with disabilities

The biggest source of knowledge right now are your employees, especially those in your disability employee communities. The insight and learning here will accelerate the learning curve. Three of our employees have already posted articles with details of how they are working day to day pragmatics:

• Leah Katz-Hernandez, a member of our CEO communications team, shares her experience as a profoundly deaf, visual-only American Sign Language (ASL) user – with tips on how to conduct great productive meetings in the virtual meeting space.
• Alyson Boote, a staff ASL interpreter, lists her recommendations for at-home remote ASL interpretation including downloadable reference guides.
• Megan Lawrence, member of our mental health employee resource group, details key tools and imperatives for maintaining emotional wellbeing including use of the toolset, MyAnalytics.

Leverage assistive technology

Now more than ever, accessibility isn’t option – it’s imperative. Online content, conference calls and virtual forums have replaced in person meetings and events for immediate future, and ‘in person’ accommodations that empower people with disabilities to consume that content have understandably reduced or stopped. However, if you embed accessibility into design of virtual or online content, you remove or reduce the potential of exclusion. You have the power to include and accessibility is the key. Here are a few tools at your disposal to assist you:

• Use Accessibility Insights to check your website, Windows or Android app for accessibility with quick easy guides on how to make them more accessible. Do this before you post content.
• Caption your videos. There are lots of ways to do this, I upload videos into Microsoft Stream (available as part of Microsoft 365) and auto captioning/editing feature prior to sharing within my organization.
• Use Accessibility Checker on any Microsoft 365 document to catch simple gotchas. Add alt-text to all images and ensure the format is screen reader friendly.
• Microsoft Teams is a one stop shop for conference calls, meetings, collaboration. If you’re looking for the simple answer to ‘is it accessible’ – yes – we’ve worked hard to making this an accessible platform for online meetings. Turn on live captions in any call or webinar, use ‘pin’ feature to keep one speaker (or in my case, my ASL interpreter) on the screen to avoid distractions, use Immersive Reader in the chat window or my favorite feature ‘background blur’ which was specifically designed by one of our deaf engineers to power up lipreading, great example of how an accessibility feature has powered up millions.

Contact us any time

The Microsoft Disability Answer Desk is available 24/7 by phone, chat or ASL Video. Please reach out if you need any advice or assistance as you learn your ‘new language.’

More to come. If you have any feedback or topics you want me to cover in next blog, pop ideas into the comments field below. Stay safe and wash your hands.

Yesterday, PlatinumGames revealed the fourth and final part of its much-hyped ‘Platinum4’ series of announcements, and the whole thing turned out to be an April Fools’ joke. It didn’t seem to sit particularly well with fans who were hoping for something more, but Hideki Kamiya has taken to social media to explain the thought process behind the whole thing.

In case you missed it, the prank teased an arcade machine for a new game called ‘Sol Cresta’, a made-up sequel to ’80s side-scrolling shoot em ups Moon Cresta and Terra Cresta. On Twitter, Kamiya says that he hopes fans “were able to get a good laugh”. His full statement can be found below (translation via Siliconera):

“We, PlatinumGames, went all-out for this year’s April Fools’ again. While I’m aware that we’re living in troubled times, as an entertainer there’s a part of me that just wants to cheer you all up, even if it’s just a little.

And a big thank you goes out to the folks at Hamster for their cooperation.

I’ve always had my own rules about April Fools’ jokes such as ‘make it obvious that it’s a lie’ and ‘make sure it doesn’t disappoint even if they know it’s a lie’ and so on. However, this time it was ‘make something that will get us (me?) excited’ and we went full stupid with it. I hope that you were able to get a good laugh and remind yourself that this is PlatinumGames.”

Judging by the reactions of fans in the prank’s YouTube comments, and indeed in our very own comment section yesterday, it sadly didn’t seem to get viewers very excited at all. Instead, people were simply left wondering whether we’ll still be getting a ‘proper’ fourth announcement in the future.

That still remains to be seen, but we sure hope there’s something else up PlatinumGames’ sleeve – for many, hyping up a joke won’t quite cut it.