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, and a host of other voice products to its own network of ATADS (Automatic Telephone Answering Devices) and Weather Radios, in English and French. The system originally was an OS/2 proprietary program which required expensive external contracts to maintain and improve. In 1997 and 1998, Environment Canada converted AVIPADS to a mixture of Unix and WindowsNT operating systems. This made the software non-proprietary, and in the process, improved the reliability, capability and quality of the system.
AVIPADS uses speech units recorded by a human, giving a "natural" touch with proper inflection and intonation. In the Unix/NT program, voice files format are concatenated together to produce "human" sounding recordings of Environment Canada bulletins. The voice files are in a format that has improved considerably on the quality of the voice output from the extremely compressed human voice files of the original program to a much cleaner and clearer sound. These files are also being used in Internet applications
The new Unix/NT AVIPADS has increased monitoring features over the original version. Using telephone lines to remotely record devices across the country required increased monitoring of each dialout to ensure that all bulletins were successfully loaded. The new system has a success rate of over 99.5%. If a bulletin has not been successfully loaded, operational forecasters are alerted of any problems.
The capability of the text-to-voice technology has been expanded in the past year or two. AVIPADS can now disseminate weather warning and watch bulletins. These bulletins are sent to Environment Canada's network of devices as well as alerting various media and other clients. The NTAVIPADS component of the system has the capability of utilizing 12 or more phone lines which allows for over 12 different devices or bulletins to be loaded simultaneously. This greatly decreases the dissemination time. Weather warnings now include an abbreviated discussion of the weather situation giving rise to the warning or watch. This has been added to increase the amount of information in a bulletin to enhance public understanding.
The Unix/NT version of Avipads now loads the majority of weather reports in all weather centres across Canada. Without this text-to-voice technology in Environment Canada's Weather Service, the delivery of a base level of service could not be effectively performed.