Station Announcers

Are the various automated station announcers announcing the names of
the new TOCs or leaving the operator name bit blank?

I notice that the female announcer at Leeds is announcing 'National
Express' and 'Crosscountry' but you can obviously tell it has been
cobbled together as it jumps about in volume all over the place

Meanwhile at Huddersfield they still haven't got Phil Sayer to
announce 'First Transpennine Express' years after the franchise
started. Who would pay for Phil to do a recording session to say 3
words, the operator?

On 22 Dec, 21:19, Andrew H <and...@hillyard22.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> Are the various automated station announcers announcing the names of
> the new TOCs or leaving the operator name bit blank?
>
> I notice that the female announcer at Leeds is announcing 'National
> Express' and 'Crosscountry' but you can obviously tell it has been
> cobbled together as it jumps about in volume all over the place

I didn't notice her saying NX or CC but I noticed she has now been
updated to say "First" TransPennine Express in the never ending, TPE,
FTPE, TPE, FTPE name changing. The on-board announcements have been
changed 3 times to my knowledge, what a farce! TransPennine Express is
the name of the franchise; Keolis should insist on it being called
that, First don't own all of it..

> Meanwhile at Huddersfield they still haven't got Phil Sayer to
> announce 'First Transpennine Express' years after the franchise
> started. Who would pay for Phil to do a recording session to say 3
> words, the operator?

Phil Sayer seems to be the West Yorkshire Metro announcer so maybe it
would be them that instigated it; however I know that WYPTE are
looking into developing a new more accurate audio visual PIS system
for the region so whether or not Huddersfield would use that or a TPE
system? I know Dewsbury has got new screens and I understand there are
plans to install these at Huddersfield in addition..

On Dec 22, 10:19 pm, Andrew H <and...@hillyard22.freeserve.co.uk>
wrote:

> Meanwhile at Huddersfield they still haven't got Phil Sayer to
> announce 'First Transpennine Express' years after the franchise
> started. Who would pay for Phil to do a recording session to say 3
> words, the operator?

It won't be long until they get the new text-to-speech system that can
say anything without re-recording voices. The newest systems are
pretty hard to tell from the real thing (partly because real speech is
recorded in parts to form all the words).

The one at King's Cross underground has been optimised considerably
from the start and is now beginning to sound decent, but there are
better systems out there. Anyone that has used a Garmin or TomTom
SatNav will probably hear better speech!

Once you have that, you can begin to give any information you wish and
update it easily in the future. Trains can swap about all over the
place at ease, and you can give custom announcements about delays if a
train should ever get realtime information on other services.

Finally, it should be cheaper as you no longer need to get a voice
artist in, or contract them to do updates in the future.

Jonathan

jonmorris <jonathan@whatmobile.net> wrote:

>Anyone that has used a Garmin or TomTom
>SatNav will probably hear better speech!


A friend has "Sven" on his TomTom. It's hilarious!