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The goal is to avoid as many mid sentence voice changes as possible. That’s hard if your announcement is one sentence: The X service from A to B has been Y’d

The goal is to avoid as many mid sentence voice changes as possible. That’s hard if your announcement is one sentence: The X service from A to B has been Y’d due to Z I’m wondering if, instead, the announcement could be: The X service from A to B has been Y’d. This is due to Z. I’ve said this before — there aren’t that many different train services. You could record every version of both sentences in full, and almost certainly record every version of every sentence in full by the same person in a tractable amount of time. I don’t think the problem scales as much as these engineers think it does.

avianlyric 4y ago
Sounds like a lot of work, and cost (voice actors aren’t free) for a some pretty marginal gain. If people can understand the announcements easily, then they’ve done their job. Anything extra is just that, extra.
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  The number of routes is bounded by the number of drivers you hire, all of whom draw an annual salary, and who operate rolling stock that is bought and fueled multiple times on a daily basis. For each of those you have to pay a voice artist to say the name of the service N times for the N types of notable announcement. Once a season. It’s nothing. As well as that, factor in the number of passengers who will listen to these announcements, and think about the impact getting the announcement perfect instead of just done. It really is the sort of thing worth getting right. But yes, you will probably have one naive engineer in the middle of all this saying “repetition is Bad(tm) so let’s factor it apart and build it programmatically!” oblivious to the whole system.
  - avianlyric 4y ago
    > But yes, you will probably have one naive engineer in the middle of all this saying “repetition is Bad(tm) so let’s factor it apart and build it programmatically!” oblivious to the whole system. Sure, because organisations like ScotRail are notorious for being engineer led, and clearly have plenty of extra cash sloshing around that couldn't be better spent improving the actual rail service.

avianlyric 4y ago

Sounds like a lot of work, and cost (voice actors aren’t free) for a some pretty marginal gain. If people can understand the announcements easily, then they’ve done their job. Anything extra is just that, extra.

gorgoiler 4y ago
The number of routes is bounded by the number of drivers you hire, all of whom draw an annual salary, and who operate rolling stock that is bought and fueled multiple times on a daily basis. For each of those you have to pay a voice artist to say the name of the service N times for the N types of notable announcement. Once a season. It’s nothing. As well as that, factor in the number of passengers who will listen to these announcements, and think about the impact getting the announcement perfect instead of just done. It really is the sort of thing worth getting right. But yes, you will probably have one naive engineer in the middle of all this saying “repetition is Bad(tm) so let’s factor it apart and build it programmatically!” oblivious to the whole system.
- avianlyric 4y ago
  > But yes, you will probably have one naive engineer in the middle of all this saying “repetition is Bad(tm) so let’s factor it apart and build it programmatically!” oblivious to the whole system. Sure, because organisations like ScotRail are notorious for being engineer led, and clearly have plenty of extra cash sloshing around that couldn't be better spent improving the actual rail service.