Summit Technology Group’s latest version of ATMOS Automated Weather Reporting adds approximately 300 new voices, including many multilingual speakers, to deliver weather reports for foreign-language stations.
The update also features a new “phrase manager” to perfect the speaking style of the synthesized voice and a “temperature trend” tool that allows users to add to their script templates comparative statements about temperature data.
The phrase manager can be used to replace overly technical weather terms with those suitable for broadcast. For example, instead of the term “broken clouds,” the user may prefer the term “partly cloudy.” Summit says this tool is also commonly being used for negative temperatures. Instead of “minus 4 degrees” the user may prefer to hear “4 below.”
The temperature trends tool compares the magnitude and direction of a temperature swing and inserts a user-defined phrase to describe such a trend. For example, for a large increase in temperatures between now and next Friday, the product could say something like
“temperatures are increasing considerably by this weekend with a high in the low 70s on Friday night.”
Summit said the new version contains dozens of smaller new features and improvements to the user experience as suggested by its user base.
This article appeared in Radio World.
