STNA takes off with Acapela.

The STNA, Central technical service of French Civil Aviation, is upgrading ISATIS, its bilingual automatic information service, with Acapela Telecom High quality TTS. ISATIS broadcasts voice and text alerts to inform pilots during landing or take-off procedures of the status of the airport installations. By adding the smooth voice of Acapela TTS, Isatis improves its intelligibility with an exceptionally high quality speech synthesis. The choice of Acapela was confirmed by the enthousiasm of pilots and ground crew from the very first tests onwards. As a faithful partner and pioneering user of Acapela speech synthesis, STNA has been using this technology since 1994 to broadcast critical information, which must be kept up to date in real time. After having minutely tested and validated Acapela's text to speech over several years of use, STNA has signed a new contract for 3 years with a new phase of deployment for Isatis, concentrating on the quality and prosody of the speech synthesis. "The messages for pilots are very dense. They require a lot of information to be communicated in a short period of time with optimal intelligibility. We have been specially working on the rhythm of the synthesis so it can deliver standard pre-programmed or automatic messages rapidly and put the accent on the sporadic information that makes up 10% of the information. The TTS will rapidly read out "Charles de Gaulle airport" to slow down and insist on exceptional information such as "large bird flock on runway". The TTS becomes meaningful by delivering the information and its importance in real time." Says Laurent Tessier from STNA. With Isatis, Acapela is now also part of the heart of the airport system to simplify the work of the ground crew. The whole work process is simplified, with a single input interface to make updating information easier, and make the system efficient and user-friendly. Isatis is the first and - so far - only system in the world to use speech synthesis that sounds so close to a human voice. It also allows transmitting the information input via a data connection to equipped planes, offering a unique data source for a better service for pilots. The new Isatis system will be deployed in main French airports, starting with Paris Charles de Gaulle this summer.