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Meteo France


Business Line :
• Telecom

Applications :
• IVR

Meteo France Success Stories



Acapela spreads rain and sun for Météo France.

The vocalization of this new service came up within the framework of other services already speech enabled by Acapela for Météo France, such as reception and navigation of its voice portal, accessible by dialling 3250*. "The high number of micro-climates that have been observed on the island gives particular emphasis to the broadcasting of meteorological information to the population." underlines Dominique Mékics, Météo France Project Manager.

To inform the inhabitants on a very regular basis, a network of meteorological stations have been linked to a vocal server which is open to the public. This IVR allows the broadcasting of several parameters gathered every hour such as temperature, wind or sky condition.

The use of Acapela text to speech enables automation of the production and broadcast information process to guarantee a real time service for critical information such as weather conditions.

Data collected at the stations is vocalized and transferred to the audio kiosk for immediate availability for the inhabitants. Information is restored with Acapela High Quality text to speech, the report is read aloud with an extremely natural and intelligible voice.

"I was really impressed by the quality of Acapela text to speech and also, as a programmer, by the easy use of the APIs provided." adds Dominique Mékics.

Text-to-speech accurately reads proper names and geographical terms, thanks to the exception and abbreviation lexicons, which enable permanent fine-tuning of the speech synthesis, to adapt it as well as possible to the field of application.

The service, available in French only, can be reached by dialling 3250*.

* France & France overseas departments only

French weather sounds better with Acapela TTS

Météo France, the French meteorology organisation, has chosen Acapela's golden tone High Quality TTS to read out the sea weather forecasts, flight condition information or weather alerts, available over the phone 24-7. Météo France had already adopted speech synthesis long ago, as an efficient way to enable, automate, and guarantee access to ever up-to-date information, and is now enriching its services with Acapela High Quality TTS. The Météo Marine sea weather forecast service for the French atlantic coast, or flight conditions for amateur pilots were already speech-enabled by Acapela Group technology.

By upgrading to Acapela HQ TTS, Météo France goes one step futher than simple intelligibility, to reach a result that has never been closer to a human voice.

The quality of the services themselves is also enhanced by this change : "Untill now, the bulletins were all recorded by different agents. Thanks to Acapela High Quality TTS, we have created a homogenous service using the same clear and intelligible voice, for easier listening and quality services." says Stephane Cottonea from Météo France.

The quality of Acapela HQ TTS technology convinced Météo France to use it to complete its alert service and automate the processing of the weather alert bulletins outside of the regional offices' opening hours. Therefore, with Acapela High Quality TTS technology, unexpected and exceptional weather conditions can be taken into account by any Météo France agent via a simple keyboard. The information is instantly added to the database to be read out in real time by the speech synthesis system, with no recording needed.

Meteo France's main mission, which is to monitor the atmospherical conditions to forecast all possible risks for the security of the population, requires the most reliable technology and full control of information from production to processing on a national scale. By enforcing the essential part that speech synthesis plays in the heart of its services, Météo France confirms the quality of Acapela's High Quality voice for the vocalisation of important information, 24-7.