ATMOS Weather Reporting has become the go-to solution for radio and television stations looking to automate their weather reports in an accurate and natural-sounding manner. Using fully customizable script templates and AI-powered synthesized speech, ATMOS users provide their listeners with comprehensive routine and emergency weather reports complete with time announcements, current conditions, and five day forecasts for multiple locations.
In the product’s most recent release, Summit Technology Group unveiled a host of new features. Foremost on the company’s list is the new IPAWS integration which provides radio and television broadcasters with more natural-sounding emergency alerts for their audiences.
Stations that choose to ignore optional EAS alerts can instead provide an unobtrusive, natural-sounding announcement in its place to convey the same message. Furthermore, users can use ATMOS’ advanced scripting language (known as ATMOS Markup Language) to create scripts that suit their station branding and include their station name or slogan. When integrated with automation, the product can produce an alert announcement and gracefully insert it into the playlist.
“Our intent with the IPAWS integration was to improve public safety in creating emergency alerts that deliver the message without the proverbial robotic voice and are delivered without preempting a station’s programming,” says Paul Stewart, President of Summit Technology Group, “we heard far too often that optional alerts were being ignored on account of the National Weather Service voice engines sounding too robotic and jarring.”
For the past five months, Summit Technology Group software engineers Jake Garza and Ravi Tripathi have worked closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to implement the interface needed to receive IPAWS alerts. The core of the interface is a cloud-based process that is hosted by redundant, geographically-separated tier-3 datacenters. This redundancy ensures proper functionality even during regional emergencies.
Summit also announced the addition of the Sponsor Manager which provides the user an intuitive tool to manage commercial advertisers and non-commercial underwriters and appending their message to weather reports. The new tool allows a user to create a sponsor, write a script, schedule the message and even track the number of times the weather report was performed. This is important considering each weather report may be aired numerous times an hour as prescribed by a station’s format and audience behavior.
“Adding a sponsors’ message to a weather report isn’t a new concept for the industry,” says Stewart, “but the environment we designed to easily edit, synthesize, and schedule these messages is where we have focused our innovation.”
In addition to these features, ATMOS can now integrate with various EAS equipment manufacturers providing the ability to automate Required Weekly Tests (RWTs) directly from within ATMOS or through virtually any automation or playout software suite. This functionality is especially useful when inserted into a playlist to provide graceful execution of RWTs that do not interfere with programming or traffic breaks.
ATMOS can be configured to provide a linear PCM (wav) file for ingest into automation or can be configured to playout the audio report directly. Subscribers are delivered a desktop application compatible with Windows 7, 8, 10, and Server 2014 or newer.
For more information, contact the Summit Technology Group sales team at +1 (844) 44-ATMOS or email sales@summittechgroup.com.
About Summit Technology Group
Summit Technology Group aims to improve on existing workflows through innovative software and hardware solutions as well as continued relationships with our clients. The group’s flagship products, SideCAR radio logger and ATMOS automated weather reporting both utilize advanced AI and machine learning technologies to deliver the most value to our broadcast clients throughout the world.
In addition, Summit Technology Group operates a broadcast engineering and consulting firm primarily through the American Midwest to provide radio and television stations a multitude of services to keep them running at peak potential.
