Acapela spreads rain and sun for Météo France.

The vocalization of this new service came up within the framework of other services already speech enabled by Acapela for Météo France, such as reception and navigation of its voice portal, accessible by dialling 3250*. "The high number of micro-climates that have been observed on the island gives particular emphasis to the broadcasting of meteorological information to the population." underlines Dominique Mékics, Météo France Project Manager.

To inform the inhabitants on a very regular basis, a network of meteorological stations have been linked to a vocal server which is open to the public. This IVR allows the broadcasting of several parameters gathered every hour such as temperature, wind or sky condition.

The use of Acapela text to speech enables automation of the production and broadcast information process to guarantee a real time service for critical information such as weather conditions.

Data collected at the stations is vocalized and transferred to the audio kiosk for immediate availability for the inhabitants. Information is restored with Acapela High Quality text to speech, the report is read aloud with an extremely natural and intelligible voice.

"I was really impressed by the quality of Acapela text to speech and also, as a programmer, by the easy use of the APIs provided." adds Dominique Mékics.

Text-to-speech accurately reads proper names and geographical terms, thanks to the exception and abbreviation lexicons, which enable permanent fine-tuning of the speech synthesis, to adapt it as well as possible to the field of application.

The service, available in French only, can be reached by dialling 3250*.

* France & France overseas departments only