Overview
Voicer allows for turnkey emergency information compliance, straight from the source.
Voicer streamlines compliance with the FCC mandate to provide a secondary audio stream of emergency information presented visually. As NewsTicker already manages your visual display of such emergency information as breaking news crawls, school closings and severe weather, Voicer works transparently to perform the required audio insertion. You don't have to shuttle files around from system to system, introducing additional points of failure.
Being compliant is seamless to your producers. They simply enter breaking news as they normally do, and send the playlist to air. Behind the scenes, NewsTicker will duck your program audio, play an aural alert tone in your desired primary audio channels on your Freedom, then restore program audio. This tone, played over your embedded audio stream, advises the visually impaired that emergency information is being displayed. NewsTicker will then duck the audio on your SAP channel and speak the text using a natural sounding voice. Once the text has completed, it will restore the SAP audio automatically.
Reduced Points of Failure
With inferior systems, you risk not having your data synchronized among disparate systems, creating non-compliance and IT/engineering headaches. With NewsTicker Voicer, the operation remains centralized in the same realm as your visual renderer, providing both an elegant and intuitive solution.
Efficient Workflow
Once integrated, there is nothing different for your producers to do. They will continue to enter and manage NewsTicker content as they did before the FCC requirement. NewsTicker Voicer is designed to work in the background, maintaining your producer's current workflow.
Features
Audio integration
Most NewsTicker clients use the FreedomHD graphical renderer downstream of master control for their ticker. Now, the same hardware can perform your entire audio tone and text-to-speech insertion.
Natural voice
NewsTicker Voicer's text-to-speech engine is built on enterprise Linux using a realistic synthetic voice. Your audience will hear your message clearly and naturally, with both male and female voice options.
Data prioritization
Voicer supports prioritization of all native NewsTicker data. With this unique feature, school closings can be temporarily interrupted with severe weather or breaking news messages, then resumed where they left off. This avoids long delays of more emergent information while still speaking all closings.
Pronunciation hinting
Voicer lets you provide phonetic versions of difficult to pronounce organizations and counties in your area so they will be faithfully reproduced on air, reducing chances of an FCC fine for incorrect pronunciation.
Custom audio files
Use your news or station voiceover talent to create custom audio files as header, transition or trailer messages, reinforcing your brand with familiar sounds.
Real-time data
Information like school closings is updated throughout the loop, not just at the top, to reduce any delay between visual and aural representations of the same data.
Spanish language support
Using NewsTicker's dual language support, Voicer can embed an optional Spanish stream where available. This stream is capable of switching between Spanish and English to continue speaking untranslated emergency information, and can work off the same base set of data as your English-only stream.
Optional discreet AES stream
Voicer can provide an optional AES/EBU pair with GPO trigger for the alert tone used on a primary audio channel, and a second pair with GPO trigger for the text-to-speech used on secondary audio channels, for use in environments performing external mixing.