NOAA weather radio channels, funny accent

Handlobraesing · Nov 3, 2006

I found a pair of used FRS radios complete with NiMH packs and half-broken desktop charger for $10.

Playing with it, I learned it has ten NOAA weather channels. I can hear stuff on channel 1. It sounds French to me. The units are in knots and nautical miles. They also have a funny accent on the word "Friday"

Why's this???

chumley · Nov 3, 2006

The voices on the NOAA stations are computer generated, so some words don't sound right. They used to pronounce winds like wine'ds. I think they have done a lot of fine tuning to get the pronunciations right.

If you live near the coast, they also have a lot of nautical weather for sailing or boating. I haven't heard any french on my radio, maybe if you're close to Canada

StevieRay · Nov 3, 2006

Computer generated voice.

MoonRise · Nov 3, 2006

The voice is computer generated.

Trivia tidbit, when NOAA was switching over to the computer voices, they had one 'female' voice and one 'male' voice. They picked names for the 'broadcasters', and the weather-related name they picked for the female voice just happened to also be the stage-name for a major "adult" actress from about 10 years previous.

The current voices are Donna and Craig.

Handlobraesing · Nov 3, 2006

MoonRise said:
The voice is computer generated.

Trivia tidbit, when NOAA was switching over to the computer voices, they had one 'female' voice and one 'male' voice. They picked names for the 'broadcasters', and the weather-related name they picked for the female voice just happened to also be the stage-name for a major "adult" actress from about 10 years previous.

The current voices are Donna and Craig.

The voice used for "This is NOAA radio Portland (call sign)" really sounds like the Macintosh text-to-read sound. By the way, Macintosh had this since '98 or so. Why didn't Windows have this cool feature for a looong time?

StevieRay · Nov 3, 2006

Handlobraesing said:
The voice used for "This is NOAA radio Portland (call sign)" really sounds like the Macintosh text-to-read sound. By the way, Macintosh had this since '98 or so. Why didn't Windows have this cool feature for a looong time?

Because they were WINDOZING! :sleepy: :crackup:

Empath · Nov 3, 2006

The Microsoft text to speech app was called Microsoft Agent. It's been available since Windows 95, which is about three years before you say it was available for Mac. I imagine it was available for Mac before '98 too. It's no big deal; it's just an app. There was third party text to speech availability even under DOS, before Windows.

jayflash · Nov 4, 2006

And I thought they were just attempting to imitate Northern Wisconsin's dialect in that the voices sound vaguely Scandinavian. Made me wonder if the East Coast NOAA voice had a Baahston accent. Dixie Chicks overtones for Texas/Gulf Coast would come to mind.

LEDMaster2003_V2 · Nov 4, 2006

The old voices are by DECTalk, from Digital Equipment. Some are still used as ID'ers (like the station Handlobraesing mentioned, as well as ours) The new voices are called Speechify. Live/recorded Human voices are still used if the comp. system is down, weather emergencies, test messages, other messages, etc.

scott.cr · Nov 4, 2006

When I was in college, one of the classroom groups that had to do a group presentation used an early (early 1990s) version of a computerized voice.

Apparently they didn't test it well, because guess how it pronounced the country of "Niger" right in front of the entire class?

(The project was about bringing low-cost technology to third-world countries.)

PhotonWrangler · Nov 4, 2006

They're using synthesized voices on the NOAA station in my area also. On eof the "female" voices pronounces the word "thunderstorms" with a vaguely Swedish accent. It comes out sounding like a lilting "THUnderSTOrms."

NOAA weather radio channels, funny accent

Handlobraesing

Banned

chumley

Enlightened

StevieRay

Enlightened

MoonRise

Enlightened

Handlobraesing

Banned

StevieRay

Enlightened

Empath

Flashaholic

jayflash

Flashlight Enthusiast

LEDMaster2003_V2

Newly Enlightened

scott.cr

Flashlight Enthusiast

PhotonWrangler

Flashaholic

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