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Acapela Group Creates a Custom-Made IVR System for Public Announcements

By Calvin Azuri
TMCnet Contributor

At Swedish railway stations, vocal passenger information has not always been very clear. Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration wants to change this and is introducing a new system for relaying passenger information which it will soon roll out across the country. This new system is based on "Jarda," which is an original text to speech voice IVR system created by Acapela Group exclusively for Trafikverket.

At most of the railway stations in Sweden, Trafikverket is the authority responsible for passenger information and public announcements. Daily thousands of announcements are made to inform passengers about arrivals, departures and disruptions.

The current practice is to have the announcements made by different Trafikverket employees via telephone lines, which has often resulted in poor audio quality and passenger confusion, mainly because some voices just aren't suitable for this purpose.

In a press release, Karl Akerlund, in charge of passenger information at Trafikverket, said, “We used to receive a lot of complaints about the poor quality of the announcements. At the same time surveys showed that vocal announcements are one of the most important sources of information for our passengers. With the new system and the synthetic voice, the relaying of public announcements will be more flexible and the sound quality much better.”

Acapela Group (News - Alert) created Jarda by leveraging its Acapela Voice Factory voice-creation technology, which is based on in-depth research into recording, segmentation and fine tuning methods used in the text to speech production process.

Acapela Voice Factory helps in the production of custom-made and exclusive voices for companies and organizations. These proprietary voices help establish high value added services and strengthen the audio identity of organizations by becoming the company’s spokespeople.

In a statement, Lars-Erik Larsson, CEO at Acapela Group, said, “Voice based communication within the public address sector has in the past often been based on pre-recorded voice prompts, a method with many limitations. By using a text to speech solution the customer is no longer limited to the existing set of voice prompts. Any information, no matter its length, can be vocalized in real time, with a very pleasant audio result. More and more companies are adopting speech technology based information systems and demand for custom-made voices is growing”.