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Ishare uic8/13/2023 UIC took advantage of the North Slope development boom in many ways. The company thrived, started landing major contracts, and gave UIC the strength to expand into other areas. Then, to take advantage of the Borough’s rising housing market, UIC established its first wholly-owned subsidiary in 1978: UIC Construction. UIC landed its first loan and built a new, larger store featuring the town’s first butcher shop and storage for fresh produce. The corporation’s first major venture was the 1974 purchase of Shontz Store, later to become Stuaqpak. UIC operations formally commenced on July 1st with three employees: Arthur Panigeo, president Wesley Aiken, land chief and Lucille Adams. UIC was officially incorporated on April 19, 1973. James Matumeak, Warren Matumeak, and Lester Suvlu also contributed their time and talents. Other founding board members included Roy Nageak, a smart young man who came from ASRC with new ideas, and Lewis Suvlu, who contributed his budgeting, planning, and accounting skills. Beverly Qalu Ahgeak, well-organized and good with numbers, kept the day-to-day operations running as secretary/treasurer. helped design the corporation so it would mesh with our subsistence lifestyle. Arthur Panigeo was elected president and brought energy and wisdom we needed to make things happen. Lloyd Ahvakana, with his military background and a strong sense of organization, was elected chairman. These future shareholders selected “Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation” as its name, to honor the town’s ancestral heritage. On March 30, 1973, the people of Barrow gathered to decide how to shape our village corporation. Whalers became corporate executives overnight and we rose to the challenge. We knew little about business, let alone running an ANCSA-mandated, multi-million dollar corporation. When UIC was established, Barrow was still very much a subsistence-oriented community. During the development of ANCSA, our leaders were creative and resourceful in adapting to the changing world around them, just like our ancestors had been. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was passed in 1971 and gave Alaska Natives as a group $944 million and title to 44 million acres of land – in exchange for our claims to 340 million acres of traditional lands, including the oil-rich area of Prudhoe Bay. UIC and its subsidiaries are committed to and strive for safety, quality, business ethics, and shareholder value. We are proud of our expanding operations which currently span over twenty-five different industries and business lines throughout most of the United States and in many foreign countries. UIC is one of Alaska’s largest companies with 4,000 employees, fifty-four subsidiaries, $3 billion in backlog, and an additional $25 billion in the pipeline. UIC Government Construction Menu Toggle.
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Acapela text to voice8/13/2023 “There are online solutions where it’s easy to create a voice, but it’s only available via the cloud, and that’s just not practical,” he said. The compatibility with offline devices that don’t have the latest neural processing chip is a key differentiator as well. We were the first in the world to do that, and we’re still going in this direction,” said Cadic.īeing able to record and re-record or artificially age the banked voice is a new and challenging capability, but one that seems to be getting results: “One big advantage is we also customize for children - we’ve made the recording script easier to read, and tuned the system to make the quality of children’s synthetic voices better. Making the process of banking their voice as easy as possible is a service many will appreciate. Many facing degenerative conditions, cancer, or certain procedures know that within a few months or years they may not be able to speak well or at all anymore. It’s a tool made specifically for people who until recently may have had no options or at best a difficult, complex process if they wanted to preserve their voice. Image Credits: Acapela GroupĪnd that’s the real point of all this - it’s not a technical demonstration of the power of neural voice tech or a demo that lets anyone feed it a celebrity voice to clone. Obviously this includes Tobii Dynavox’s TD Talk and devices the company just released a new one last week, in fact - these things are getting pretty sleek.ĭelaina tests out the new Tobii Dynavox device. Now that it’s there, if I ever need it I can go and download it for a fee to use on any compatible speech-generation system. The quality is fine - not uncanny like some models out there can be, but clearly my own voice (as advertised) and able to handle any sentence I threw at it in the demo page. The recording interface was simple and easy to navigate, and sure enough, a day or so later my voice was ready to use. They weren’t kidding about how quick and easy it is: I went through the new “my own voice” process, and it really was just 50 short sentences, drawn from a (random, it seemed) corpus of novels, recipe books, and articles. Many have voices they would rather use, but it wasn’t until recently that it was an option. Having a speech generator that uses one’s own voice is certainly something a growing number of people can appreciate - choosing from a list is a bit dehumanizing. “There’s definitely a revolution going on with neural text-to-speech techniques.” Now we can bank a voice with just 50 sentences recorded it takes about 10 minutes and the voice is ready the next day,” he said. “It was very time consuming - the patient had to train for 8 hours. Seven or 8 years ago, Acapela co-founder Remy Cadic recalls, it was not just tedious to customize a synthetic voice for yourself, but the results weren’t particularly good. Like many industries, accessibility has been heavily influenced by the advent of consumer-scale machine learning processes. Acapela Group has these folks squarely in mind with its new “my own voice” service, which lets anyone train an AI voice profile for free.Īcapela has been in the text-to-speech space for around 25 years and was recently acquired by tech accessibility giant Tobii Dynavox, though they still operate independently. Synthetic speech can be a fearful object these days when paired with deepfakes and other AI deceptions, but it’s also an indispensable tool for anyone who can no longer speak on their own. |