Royal Victoria on-board announcement

It isn't as straightforward as text-to-speech. A voice-recording artist would have been used to produce the PA announcements. If the AirLine was planned when the AV equipement was being installed on the DLR, then TfL would have paid for the audio/visual equipment to have the script already installed. If not, it would have to be specially ordered by the company who produces the scripts.

It's not a cheap process by any means either, especially when you start getting into the realms of new stations and routes. A company needs to be paid to design and record and then program the finished product into (how many) units. Add the cost of the voice artist and boom.

When we had the old digital PA at London Victoria (only recently retired), IIRC the company who produced it were asking in excess of £5000 just to add Mitcham Eastfields into the voice database!!!!!

I don't recall any such announcements when I was there.

Interesting stuff. I was always interested in the auto PA systems used by Network SouthEast. When speaking, you raise the pitch (?) of your voice at the end of each sentence. When the auto announcer read out the station stops of each train, the pitch would go up and down, changing the emphasis on certain station names.

I notice this on other systems as well. For example on the buses, my stop "King Edward Street" is pronounced with the stress on "Street". I suspect the actor was reading an alphabetical list and the previous entry was something like "King Edward Road"

Another quirk: on SWT, we get "change here for the (slight pause) xxxxx Line" - as if the announcer has forgotten which line it is and has had to check the tube map. Also, in the litany "Raynes Park, Motspur Park, Worcester Park" you would expect the stress to be on the first word as that is what varies from one to t'other, but no, we get "......Raynes PARK, Motspur PARK, Worcester PARK"

@alight

Don't be too sad...Phil Sayer will be making a brief comeback (possibly Monday) to Victoria for the Olympics period.

Victoria went over to the Southern-wide AMEY system mid-June, with the associated change in PA announcements. This replaced the ATOS system (without PA) and DITRA. However, certain issues with AMEY (whose temper resembles that of a real woman) means that Mr Sayer will be back thanks to hindsight which kept ATOS and DITRA alive somewhere.

The DITRA was very advanced for it's time for early - mid 80's tech. Solid state rather than individual tapes. A high level of flexibility for diversions, connections, bus replacements etc. The varying tone in the voice to make it as human-sounding as possible is all done in the programming of individual sentences and how they are built up rather than recording the word over and over again. Now, it's "just stitch the words together and sod what it sounds like". I still prefer it over the sounds of some of the more "up-to-date" systems now used. Phil's the man.