I understand it varies by fleet.
Both the class 385 and 170 still have their own respective voices, atleast since the last time I was on them a few months ago.
Are these announcement files public anywhere? Lots of proprietary sound formats from that era (late 90s/early 00s) can generally be reverse engineered by any software nerd with the spare time to try to figure out how to import it into Audacity! The hard parts are finding out how it is encoded, but this is largely a matter of trial and error as compressed sound formats (e.g. mp3s) weren't very commonplace in such times, as they take up a lot of processing power (by early 2000s standards anyway) which I doubt are present in an embedded system such as that.
i confirm this as i have been on both in the past 2 weeks.
The BTP "see it, say it, sorted" message has been changed to the new voice on the HST fleet. Sounds odd as the rest of the announcements haven't been changed.
They have the same voice. Fletcher Mathers voices both of them. The difference is that they use different files. The 170s use the original files. The 385s use newly recorded files that were done just before the trains were rolled out. So it is the same person but different recordings and about twenty years between the two recording sessions which is why the 170s and the 385s sound different.
Yeah, the minimalist approach of this system works well in my opinion. They never should have changed it for the 385s.
Yes the 380s all have new TTS Vannessa announcements that replaced the TTS Iona announcements last month. All our classes of trains will get TTS Vannessa later this year. It is a bit of a downgrade compared to the Fletcher Mathers announcements.
Quite frankly, I don’t see what was wrong with the previous announcements. They’ve taken something that worked perfectly well and replaced it with a text-to-speech voice for no good reason. I really don’t understand ScotRail’s obsession with using TTS voices on their trains.
I agree with you, it's not good especially for the voice actors not getting work again due to this. I think the main benefits are in flexibility to just punch in whatever you want (disruptions, engineering work etc) without having to re-record things and upload them. Aside from the uploading of new announcements, I don't see why it needed to be TTS. You could've got literally any voice to do additional engineering works/disruption etc.
The problem was it was made up of individually recommended messages, all of which had to be cut and pasted together for every route then uploaded to every cab individually using a flash card. Any updates took weeks to process and the technology used is now obsolete. With the new system it can be updated in seconds and any new or temporary calling patterns required due to engineering works can easily be added. It didn't work "perfectly well" at all
I find that difficult to believe. On most modern Passenger Information Systems, station names and phrases are assembled by the system in real time, rather than being manually created for every individual route. These systems also usually support remote updates, so there’s clearly no need to rely on SD cards. If necessary, engineering-work announcements could have been added using the older recordings as well. Likewise, if a special service needed a different calling pattern, the system could simply read the headcode and generate the appropriate sequence of stations and phrases automatically. As far as I’m aware, the system itself hasn’t changed; the train doesn't generate announcements live, but builds them from pre-generated files, which means the newer version is effectively doing the same thing, just providing worse quality announcements.
Class 318/320/158/170 don't support remote updates so the files have to be flashed to every cab. Hard to believe if you like but it's true, and the reason the system has changed.
It is not really that much simpler or quicker to use TTS files as the system is still the same. The only thing that is quicker is the Scotrail can now generate new TTS files straight away rather than having to contact Fletcher Mathers and wait for her to record them. But they still have to upload the new TTS files when they want new announcements. So far none of the actual PIS systems have changed.
