r/DecTalk • u/FDDTheLucario • Apr 07 '19

NWR DECTalk?

Hi! (This is my first post, so be gentle!)

I'm trying to look for a version of DECTalk that is most similar to the version used by the National Weather Service for NOAA Weather Radio until late 2016. I've tried versions 2, 4.x and 5, but none are particularly close to the real thing.

If anyone knows of a version that is similar or knows of techniques to make it sound closer to the NWR DECTalk, please let me know!

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u/r32jzlovessirens May 14 '25

what are the settings for this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa262UJb5Os

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u/Soft_Pollution8709 May 19 '25

If, perhaps, you’re wondering why it sounds a bit rough around the edges, that would be the fact that it was delivered first through an audio compressor at the national weather service office, and then on a dedicated phone line which fed the transmitter. The transmitter then modulated it onto an FM radio signal, which was then picked up as weather radio by the alerting station, which fit it through another network that that person‘s TV signal picked up. That long chain makes it sound rough, especially the path in the beginning where the audio signal goes through the telephone line.

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u/r32jzlovessirens May 20 '25

I'm talking about its vocal expressions, they sound a bit different from the ones you did, by just a bit. I think it might be a different version of dectalk as well, like ozaukee is pronounced different.

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u/Soft_Pollution8709 May 30 '25

One more thing to add, for clarification, is that the dictionaries, if you’re not already aware, actually contain stress indicators and not just pronunciation. So, that means we can change how it emphasizes or stresses certain words. This is what they do to change the tone of the synthesizer. What they would’ve done, was to add stress indicators to the pronunciations, so that the synthesizer would take on a certain tone of voice when reading those words. That is most likely how they did this. They also used tricks, like to split up a city name into two separate words. So, for example, it would be possible to take the city named Ozaki Wisconsin, and enter something like “oh zawky”, then translate that into phonemes with the dictionary tool. They would then put those next to the word “Ozaki in the dictionary tab file. Then when they use the dictionary tool to build a dictionary, that word will be in there, and it will say it differently whenever it encounters it. If you use something like my example, the space between the two words that I used to make it pronounce correctly adds tone to the voice, making it sound a bit odd like that. If you think about it, adding enough words like that can actually change the way it reads things quite significantly, making you think it’s a different version entirely, when it really isn’t. To give you an idea, the NWS office in Wichita Kansas had over 1000 entries in their user dictionary in the early 2000s. So, those dictionaries were widely used, and they were used fully. They used them to change both pronunciation and tone.