[time-nuts] Talking Clock

[jimlux]

On 9/30/19 7:05 PM, Bob kb8tq 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”.

Typically one records 60 phrases - that is, rather than recording 
twenty, thirty, forty, and one, two, three and try to assemble them - 
you record all the numbers 00,01,02,03...

After all, your time is *free* to do the recording, and it makes the 
software to play it back easier (you don't have to figure out "is this 
less than 20 in which case play phrase[0] through phrase[19], and then 
play phrasetens[t/10] + phrase[t mod 10]



> 
> 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 would be a bit tedious..


There are, of course, myriad text to speech programs of varying quality 
available for just about every OS imaginable.  Although, in 10 minutes 
of casual browsing, I've not yet found one for Latin - a suitable voice 
intoning the time in Latin periodically would seem to be a good addition 
to any time cave.


Google translate does speak Latin, although I've not had my family 
classics scholar evaluate it.  To my ear, it seems to have a distinctly 
Italianate accent (a terminal vowel added to words), although it does 
say "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" and "Carthago delenda est" correctly.


> 
> 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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> 
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