[EAS] Multilingual support for CAP messages

[Sean Donelan]

On Sat, 26 Mar 2016, Ed Czarnecki wrote:
> Sean --> Onboard TTS is not necessarily needed IF the originator supplies a
> foreign language audio resource.  However, it is a very good assumption that
> an alert originator may not furnish such a file.  Particularly if WEA alerts

I don't like TTS for lots of reasons, its more difficult to do well than 
people assume, but ...

Alert originators should always include audio message files/links with 
CAP.

Alert distributors should always be prepared for a missing/non-existant 
audio message with a decent text-to-speech engine and local lexicon for
the languages they support.

I wouldn't expect alert distributors to support hundreds of languages, but
they should support at least their primary audience's language as long as
an alert originator provides the warnings in those languages.  Solving
the multi-language warning problem is beyond EAS.

As best as I can tell, the various licensed TTS engines being used in CAP 
equipment have options for mroe than a dozen different languages (and 
dozens of dialects) although a CAP manufacturer may not have licenses 
available for all of them. One of the TTS engine vendors claims they
support over 70 languages, but I don't know how well.

A native speaker will still sound better, so include audio files for
the languages.