Météo France: when speech synthesis meets the terminology challenge

10 +

Years of partnership

2

Tailor-made voices

+1 million

minutes of audio generated

 

 

Since 2012, Météo France has teamed up with Voxygen to optimise the vocalisation service for weather reports offered via its telephone kiosk. 

Météo France's choice of Voxygen was primarily motivated by the robustness, quality and flexibility of Voxygen's technology. The context of weather forecasting is extremely specific and needs to be treated with great care, not only to integrate the terms and abbreviations specific to the field into lexicons, but also to implement textual pre-processing to render numerical data such as temperatures, pressures, wind speeds, etc. in a precise and perfectly intelligible manner.

Météo France entrusted Voxygen with the creation of two digital voices adapted to its needs. During the project, Météo France's operational teams worked in close collaboration with Voxygen and were able to appreciate the expertise of Voxygen's teams both in defining the characteristics of the voice and in adapting the technology to optimise voice quality for the specific context of weather forecasting.

The operational deployment of Voxygen's TTS went off without a hitch. Météo France opted for the Voxygen Server solution, which is both robust and scalable, and which was designed to enable bulletins to be broadcast periodically with maximum responsiveness. The success of this deployment is largely due to the ease with which the Voxygen Server product can be implemented, and to the invaluable help provided by Voxygen, which offered high-quality technical support.

In this relationship of trust with Météo France, Voxygen always acts with proximity and professionalism, whether to improve the voices made available or to propose its latest technological developments.