Monday, February 13, 2012

CAP Text not allowed to Speak in USA

The U.S. has banned Emergency Alerting Systems from using Text-To-Speech in broadcasting Common Alerting Protocol generated messages.

Excerpt from the article – Many of those in my community have a hard time understanding the current version of text to speech. In other words, us old folks can’t hear what the computer is saying. There’s also the issue of geographical differences in words. For example, is “soda” and “pop” the same as “soda pop” or “Coke”. If one were to write “I’d like a Coke and fries”, the computer will read that hearer may need more information, ex. “We don’t serve Coke, is Royal Crown Cola OK?”

Here's what I had to say in the LIRNEasia blog relating it to the Freedom Fone and Sahana project.