Applications of Environment Canada's text-to-voice system for alerting media and emgerncy officials of significant weather

Since 1994, Environment Canada has relied upon a text-to-voice generating system called AVIPADS (Automated Voice Information Processing and Dissemination System) to deliver its forecasts, hourly weather reports, Warnings and a host of other voice products to its own network of ATAD’s (Automatic Telephone Answering Devices) and Weatheradios, in English and French. AVIPADS uses vocabulary of almost 40,000 words and phrases recorded by a human, to give a natural sounding product, with proper inflections and intonations. Once a bulletin is issued, the text is matched with the vocabulary and then concatenated into voice files. AVIPADS currently records almost all of the content Environment Canada provides on its voice recording networks. Timely dissemination of warnings has always been a concern to the weather services. As AVIPADS evolved, it presented Environment Canada with a new mechanism to help alert the Media and Emergency Officials of weather warnings issued in their area of concern. AVIPADS’ number one priority is to load Environment Canada’s dissemination devices, however immediately following that, AVIPADS has the capability to be effective in alerting Media and Emergency Officials of weather warnings issued prior to their availability on the wire services. Recent improvements to the AVIPADS system have included amongst others, the inclusion of streaming technologies for Internet applications. AVIPADS is capable of FTP'ing a wave file of the weather warning which can then be replayed on air if so desired by a media outlet. The latest capability is the inclusion of the weather warning’s free-form discussion. This provides more information to the users which can help the listener understand the meteorological situation better and the potential risks that are associated. AVIPADS is a robust and reliable tool for disseminating weather information and is being adapted to enhance the service provided to the media and emergency officials.