[time-nuts] Talking Clock

[William H. Fite]

"Alexa, what time is it?"


On Monday, September 30, 2019, Bob kb8tq <kb8tq at n1k.org> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Based on only dimly remembered conversations long long ago:
>
> Getting all the “message fragments” so they sound natural and not choppy
> is
> not quite as easy as it seems at first. It’s by not quite rocket science,
> but there
> is more fiddling involved than one might think.
>
> One “solution” is to use fewer fragments and record larger portions of the
> message.
> Back in the day, storage limited your ability to record every message
> “full up”.
>
> Assuming you record the “at the stroke the time will be” only once, the
> rest is
> under 3 seconds of audio. At maybe 16 bits / 32K sps. (yes that’s
> overkill). this comes
> up just under 200 K bytes. Recording the full time message for every
> minute of the
> day would be less than 270 megabytes.
>
> That’s a pretty small flash drive ….
>
> Bob
>
>
>
>
> > On Sep 30, 2019, at 4:00 PM, Neville Michie <namichie at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Here in Australia we are suffering the loss
> > of one of the significant developments in accurate time keeping and
> dissemination.
> > The talking clock, built in England, with sound tracks on rotating glass
> disks,
> > has been on the Australian telephone system for more than half a century.
> > The system was timed by quartz oscillators, synchronised to the local
> observatory time.
> > Now in spite of the trivial cost of maintaining the system it has been
> removed by
> > the money-hungry telco which took over the government run telephone
> system.
> > Now it occurs to me that the sound tracks occupy a very small digital
> space, and
> > with modern flash drives and a little logic the talking clock could be
> driven by
> > any time nut's disciplined time source.
> > So is there a time nut who could design a voice output that we could all
> use?
> >
> > “At the third stroke the time will be…”
> >
> > cheers,
> > Neville Michie
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Homo sum humani a me nihil alienum puto.