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by jrockway 218 days ago
I love how long the terrible speech synthesis on BART lasted. I don't mean this in a negative way at all. BART was so state of the art when it was built, that it still feels like the future today. They did a good job on ... everything.

Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.
2 comments
inferiorhuman 204 days ago 

  They did a good job on ... everything.
Nah, they did a good job on one thing: PR. As public transit? We've been suffering the consequences of their chronic NIH for going on fifty years now.

  Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go
  find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.
BART's covered the topic of their computerized voices a few times. This was the first I found, but they've covered it more recently with the arrival of their newer trains.

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309

link
Symbiote 217 days ago
Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips, so I'm surprised BART chose this synthesized system. Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vW3hheSml3Q

link
inferiorhuman 204 days ago 

  Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips
BART did too. I think the announcements date back to the early days of BART. The computerized text-to-speech didn't come around until 2000 and only cover train arrivals.

  Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?
BART's always gone for style over substance, so yeah that probably played a part in it. There's a small chance that text-to-speech was cheaper than paying a human.

In San Francisco, Muni paid a Texan to record stop announcements for their buses. I've absolutely no idea how this ended up being the case but she absolutely massacred the pronunciation of a few (mostly Spanish) words.

link