July 15, 2025

Watch our exclusive webinar on how AI is transforming name pronunciation at graduation ceremonies. For too many graduates, mispronounced names turn a proud moment into disappointment. Our AI-supported system works with professional voice artists to ensure every graduate hears their name pronounced correctly and confidently, making high-quality announcements accessible to schools of all sizes.

Hear from the University of North Florida about their real-world experience with Tassel's system and how it improved their ceremony. Our team will demonstrate the technology, explain our human oversight process, and show how this hybrid approach has achieved record satisfaction scores. Whether you're curious about the technology or interested in better serving students with diverse names, this webinar shows how AI can honor tradition while embracing innovation—because every name matters.

Soon, staff will have access to all graduate-confirmed AI pronunciations directly in the Hub—no more guessing or back-and-forth.

We’re also building support for multiple preferred names, so a graduate can use different names across ceremonies if needed—legal, chosen, or stage name.

We’re constantly expanding our phonetics database to better cover a wide range of name origins and spellings.

Tassel is actively working on improving our AI system with more targeted training on culturally diverse names, especially those frequently mispronounced.

And finally, we’re strengthening our QA for cases where students don’t log in, so even if they don’t review their name, it still gets reviewed with care. We are working on a confidence model to help our QA team validate the names more accurately.

Our process for producing pre-recorded graduate names recently changed in order to improve accuracy. Please read the below FAQ and contact your Customer Success Manager if you have any additional questions.

For students who feel that AI-generated name readings might seem less personal, we would offer a different perspective: the purpose of this technology is to give every graduate the opportunity to ensure their name — something deeply personal and meaningful — is pronounced correctly during their moment on stage. This is especially valuable for students with names that may be less familiar or more challenging to pronounce, ensuring equitable recognition for all.

Your name recordings will sound natural and authentic. Since they are based on thousands of previously-recorded names from our voice artists, our synthetic voices will sound as confident and familiar as a practical voice recording. 

Still not convinced? Play our AI Name game, available now.

Our pronunciation database has phonetic pronunciation components for over 100k names. It searches for similar names and produces a recording based on its components. In addition to our proprietary database of graduate names, we also use 3rd party APIs and Open Source databases that include over a billion pronunciation records. This helps ensure every name is announced accurately and with care.

Graduates will have the opportunity to review their name recording right on the registration website. They can approve the pronunciation or direct the system to try again. The website will attempt to generate the name up to three times. If all three pronunciations are incorrect, the student will be prompted to record their own name and provide phonetics. This commentary will be sent to a professional reader to record their name based on the provided information. 

If a graduate rejects the first three attempts to automatically generate their name recording, then they will be prompted to record their own pronunciation, and a professional voice artist will make a new recording using the graduate-provided pronunciation as a guide. 

We now utilize AI to generate names when possible. The synthetic voices are based on real voice artists, who will still be engaged to create new recordings if a graduate’s name is not pronounced to their satisfaction at first.

This technology gives graduates an opportunity to listen to their name recording before the ceremony, thus decreasing the chances of a mispronunciation. Name accuracy has always been a goal of ours at Tassel, and these new tools allow us to reach this goal faster, with less downtime during the processing period. We can deliver your ceremony software with confidence, knowing that your graduates have had a chance to review their name announcements beforehand. These tools will also make adding late graduates a more seamless process. And the entire product is backed by real voice artists who are on-hand to record a new name announcement if a graduate asks for it.

Yes, we have cloned the voices of our professional readers to ensure continuity in name reading.

Not at all. Since graduates will now have the chance to review and approve their name announcement before their ceremony, we expect the accuracy of our name pronunciations to make a jump past our already-high standards.  

As before, ceremony coordinators will have the option to ask graduates for a “Preferred Name” on the registration form. This submission would be reviewed by the ceremony coordinator and be used instead of the “Official Name on File” to be displayed and announced. If the “Preferred Name” question is not included on the registration form, then our recording process will default to the “Official Name on File.” Our policy continues to be that graduates cannot use written or audio pronunciation fields to change their name for display and announcement. If the “Preferred Name” question is not used, then graduates will have to contact their ceremony coordinators to request a change. 

Any update to the graduates name will wipe out the existing approved recording. If the grad does log back in, they will have the ability to review and re-approve the updated name. If they do not log back in, the new recording will be generated based off the updated name, and it will be QA'd through the traditional process.

The registration form will ask the student for their preferred name, as it did previously. If the student utilizes the field, their recording will be updated based on their submission. Ceremony coordinators should validate preferred names prior to the graduate data deadline. 

Ceremony coordinators will have the opportunity to review and approve all submissions before production. Graduates that submit a response to the Preferred Name question will be listed in a Graduate View where they can be reviewed, edited, and approved by the ceremony coordinator. 

If a graduate never logs in or registers, the recording will still be generated and will be QA'd through the traditional process.

We recommend submitting names early to ensure recordings are ready in time. If a student is added last minute, their name won’t have a pre-recorded announcement—but it can still be read live at the ceremony using a printed card or label.