
23 Mar Text-To-Speech technologies available in Romania
Good news for Grassroots Radio stations in Romania! The Romanian stations have had their first Text-To-Speech (TTS) broadcasts. These include some news stories as well as an automatic weather and wind audio forecast generated and placed on their schedule four times a day.
The content of the news stories comes from internet sources, some of which the station managers write or edit themselves. Additionally, they are making content related to COVID-19. The station managers find the employment of TTS technologies valuable because there are only a few volunteers available to record themselves reading the text that the station managers prepare.
The weather news are instead updated automatically three times a day though a mp3 file that is automatically added to the schedule at a preset time. The forecast contains temp, weather, wind speed and direction. It is created by taking mostly numeric data (temperature, speed, etc.) from a free weather data source and inserting it into a script.
TTS technologies are a major component structuring the Grassroots Radio project. They help to generate spoken content when the stations cannot be staffed by presenters, enabling the community to maintain a local radio station with relevant news supporting local languages.
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