A second more complex example of limited domain synthesis involves presenting the current weather throughout the US. Here we use a simple script to get the current weather from http://weather.gov for a named city and state. The script extracts the basic information for outlook, temperature and wind speed and direction. The distribution of these was analysed and a database of one hundred utterances was generated to cover all dates, temperatures etc. A limited domain synthesizer as described in chapter 7 was created. These are actually used using a slightly newer version of the clunits Festival module than in the Festival 1.4.1 release, and requires that update to run reasonably (both in quality and speed).

The weather reports are updated approximately every hour. The synthesized outputs are taken from the cache if a recently example exists to save time in synthesis and to deal with occasional slow access to weather.gov. It takes significantly longer to send the waveform file over the web than it does to synthesize it.

NOTE: This is designed to demo our synthesis technique rather than provide useful weather updates. This allows us to demo synthesis of dynamically changing but constrained data, though our script that gets the weather sometimes fails to parse the text data from weather.gov and hence an apology message is generated.

Some standard cities

• Pittsburgh, PA
• New York City, NY
• Boston, MA
• Portland, OR
• Miami, FL

Or enter city name and select state.

The city name is as defined by the National Weather Service and may be arbitrarily (but consistently) abbreviated. Not all cities are available, to find out the appropriate name to enter check the hourly reports for that state at http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/iwdspg1.html.