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A change in today's forecast Weather Service turns to computerized `voice' By BILL KETTLER A strange, new voice comes to local weather forecasts today. The Medford office of the National Weather Service is introducing artificial speech into its weather forecasts. A computer-generated "voice" will "read" forecasts as soon as they are written, saving forecasters the work of recording and updating weather information. The forecasts are broadcast continuously on fixed-frequency "weather radios" that are popular among outdoor enthusiasts, farmers and other people with an interest in the weather. Forecasts from the Medford office cover an area north to Roseburg, west to the ocean, south to Mount Shasta and east to Klamath and Lake counties. The weather service has christened the new service "Weather Radio 2000," said Roger Williams, meteorologist in charge at the Medford office. Williams said many weather stations in other parts of the United States already have incorporated computer-generated speech into their weather broadcasts. The synthetic-speech computer is one aspect of a $4.5-billion modernization of the National Weather Service that began in the early 1990s. Another part of the modernization brought a new weather radar to the summit of Mount Ashland in 1995. Williams said the new computer will allow forecasters to spend more time monitoring and collecting weather data. Recording the forecasts has consumed about an hour a day of a forecaster's time. "That doesn't sound like a lot of time," he said, "but when you multiply it for every shift and every day, it will give us a lot more time to do other things." Williams said the new artificial voice may aggravate some weather radio listeners who have grown accustomed to hearing familiar voices reading the weather bulletins. "Some people may not embrace it," he said, "but hopefully in time they will accept it." Williams said technicians have tried to teach the computer correct pronunciations for local place names. To get it to pronounce "Oregon" correctly, they tried several different spellings before they settled on a phonetic-like "Orregun." Williams said some pronunciation problems remain unsolved and some sounds may grate on listeners' ears. The computer still calls the big mountain in Northern California "Mount Shaysta." "No doubt we'll be getting some calls from people in Northern California," Williams said. Technicians will continue to work with the computer to improve its pronunciation, he said. Some forecasters who have enjoyed recording the forecast aren't happy about giving up that part of their job to the new computer, Williams said. "They have a lot of names for it, but I don't think you could print any of them in a newspaper." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA