[EAS] Why we need Text-To-Speech

[Clay Freinwald]

Hi Sean - 

I was just playing with one of the Text to Speech sites on line ...Just for
drill, I asked it to pronounce some local (to this area) names 

PUYALLUP (City just east of Tacoma)  - It said it perfectly.

STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA (Body of water between US and Vancouver Island,
Canada)  - It said it perfectly

SEQUIM  (Town on the south side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca) - It called
it - SEE-QUIM.    So I changed it to Squim and it did fine.   This is a
classic case of know how to write for a Text Reader.

Give it a try - 

As for when the Internet is down - 

The Internet is not just ONE system that all goes bad at the same time.  You
may have a ISP go down, or a chunk of land-line between two points etc.  Not
likely the whole thing will die at the same time.  Way too much redundancy.
On that topic - Check out the latest issue of Scientific American for a
great article on how to make these IP connected systems more robust.

Clay Freinwald

-----Original Message-----
From: eas-bounces at radiolists.net [mailto:eas-bounces at radiolists.net] On
Behalf Of Sean Donelan

On Wed, 14 Mar 2012, Richard_Rudman wrote:
> That said, we readily admit that TTS is still not perfect. We believe 
> that the quest for "perfect" should not stand in the way of a CAP 
> IPAWS OPEN feature that is certainly, even with inevitable 
> pronunciation issues, better than a noisy and barely intelligible audio
file.
>
> Posting this does demonstrate why we need TTS in the Rules.

A much better approach.

Technical fixes work for technical problems.  Previous comments were framing
text-to-speech as a solution for a people problem. 
People problems are rarely fixed with technical solutions.

As you point out, people should not expect text to speech to be the perfect
solution either.  People will likely find all sorts of new ways to still
mess up.  And what to do when the Internet is down.

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