www.aviavox.com

It’s Phoneme-nal

AviaVox, a Dutch enterprise based in Schiphol-Rijk in the Netherlands, specializes in intelligent automatic announcements. The company has developed a state-of-the-art technology for making announcements in all the terminals and boarding gates at the airport. The system uses a highly modern so-called phoneme technology that nowadays is being implemented at many airports, such as London Heathrow, Bristol Airport, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Doha and Lisbon.

Intelligent Announcement System

The AviaVox intelligent announcement system

is specifically designed for airports and airlines and addresses many solutions to well-known issues that airports are experiencing day by day. With the new phoneme technology, natural announcements can be made fully automatically in a multitude of languages. The quality of those announcements is at an extremely high level and can not be distinguished from a human speaker. Yet it is the phoneme technology that actually makes the computer speak.

The artificial announcements are generated by AviaVox-Software, which uses digitized speech fragments called phonemes. If the intonation of words within sentences is analyzed, then the conclusion has to be made that the pronunciation of a word is very much dependant on the position within the sentence and is also influenced by the words that are in front and immediately behind it. Within the AviaVox system every word is dynamically built with these phonemes to get the intonation, speed and timbre exactly right. The word ‘passenger’ for example is built up in this way from a total of 36 phonemes.

The AviaVox system takes its feed from the AODB/FIDS systems at the airport. Hence it will dynamically make announcements based on the real-time situation at the airport and the airport announcement policy, which is reflected in a number of parameter settings. AviaVox has not only developed the interfaces to these AODB/FIDS systems but also connects to a variety of PA systems. This can be done either digitally or on a ‘hard-contact’ basis. Both type of connections are frequently being used.

With a traditional pre-recorded system the maintenance of a voice base is often a major problem. If a new airline, destination or other change needs to be made, new recordings are inevitable. This is often very expensive and if the original speaker is no longer available all the recordings will have to be made again, because one cannot mix the voices of multiple speakers without it being obvious to listeners.

In addition to the excellent quality of the announcements, the AviaVox phoneme technology offers another mayor benefit over pre-recorded systems. This is the maintenance of the voice base, which is done dynamically, real-time and on a subscription based service to avoid unexpected high costs. Since in the AviaVox system there are no sentences – only sentence-structures – the phonemes can be interchanged and used to build various words. AviaVox has a rich central database where phonemes are stored.

Heathrow –for instance- uses about 10 percent of the available phonemes on the central database to cover its daily needs. Yet in the first four months of operating the system, the airport downloaded and refreshed about four million phonemes, which illustrates the need for frequent changes. All airports, large and small, share this need.

A new software application, the Airline-Gate-Client, recently has been developed to support the boarding procedures of an airline with automatic announcements. This software tool is unique in the world and the ability to generate more than 8.000 different kind of boarding announcements accommodates the overall and specific requirements of hundreds of airlines.

AviaVox BV
Star Parc, Boeing Avenue 271
1119 PD Schiphol-Rijk
The Netherlands

Tel: +31 (0)20 750 67 60
Fax: +31 (0)20 354 02 58
Email johan.godin@aviavox.com
Website: www.aviavox.com

 

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