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.