Wednesday, July 11, 2001
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Wednesday, July 11, 2001 |
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Goodbye, Igor By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Vladimir's depressed. His flat monotone has become even flatter. He knows his time is running out, I swear he does. We first "met" Vladimir a.k.a. Igor, the voice of the National Weather Service about five years ago when Dave still had his sailboat on Lake Walter F. George. We listen carefully to weather radio, especially while boating, and our reaction was the same as that of millions of Americans who puzzled over the curious accent: Considering how life-and-death-important weather warnings can be, why did they hire some guy whose English is ... well, partly cloudy? This fellow drones on, hour after hour, with the oddest timing and emphases. English, you know, has a rhythm of its own, more pronounced than most European tongues, and Igor never mastered it. I have a modestly good ear for language, and can spot at least the best-known accents from western European, a few Asian, Scandinavian but this was clearly none of those. We finally settled on eastern Europe, Baltic, perhaps, maybe Russian, and that's why we nicknamed him Vladimir before learning that others called him Igor. Sooner or later, of course, those of us who pay attention to weather radio began to catch on that Igor's voice is computer-generated. "Someone needs to get into that program and correct some of those odd pronunciations and inflections," I told Dave. "If the telephone company can do it, surely NOAA can too." (Years ago I was intrigued to learn that when Southern Bell recorded messages like, "That number has been changed. The NEW number is 555-8135. Please make a note of it," the pitch of the voice when it says "5" at the beginning drops on the final "5," as a live speaker would lower the end of a declarative sentence. Igor lacks that finesse.) Then came a note from my friend Beth Snipes, former Citizen photographer and alert fellow listener to weather radio, as well as to National Public Radio. "Did you happen to catch 'All Things Considered' this evening?" she wrote. "They did a story about our Vladimir. Apparently the rest of the world calls him Igor. NOAA has received so many complaints about Vladigor that they are going to replace the poor guy with a new voice. Seems some folks didn't like Igor's accent, so the new voice will sound like he's from Cleveland or something. Anyway, felt sad for old Vlad and knew you'd understand." I found the story, by Linda Wertheimer, archived on NPR's Web site, HtmlResAnchor http://www.npr.org/search/, and listened closely. And what I heard made me want to go "meet" Vladimir/Igor in the flesh, or perhaps I should say, in the chips, while he was still employed. Meteorologist-in-charge Lans Rothfusz warned me I'd be disappointed in Igor, but kindly arranged for me to meet with Frank Taylor, data acquisition program manager for NWS in Peachtree City. Igor is indeed a computer program, Taylor said, first tested in the Columbus, Ga. area, which explains why we heard him on Lake Walter F. George several years before his national debut on Feb. 1, 1999. Taylor said our guess that Igor was eastern European was echoed by many other listeners. "We got comments like, Why are we hiring foreign nationals and then working them such long hours? Why are we using this Spanish guy?" "He's not Spanish," Taylor and his colleagues would respond. "He's a computer-generated voice." Then why did the U.S. government buy a Spanish computer? questioners persisted. (The process was actually invented by a Scandinavian, Taylor said, although the characteristic lilt of Swedish or Norwegian does not surface in Igor's voice.) So, why is a flat computerized voice preferable to recording a real, live meteorologist? I asked Taylor. Seconds count in severe weather advisories, he said, and now NWS can disseminate information to many different users (like TV and radio and Igor) simultaneously, from any station. "It used to require someone to read the information into a recording device similar to an old eight-track tape player," Taylor said, "and putting out a warning used to engage as many as 34 buttons. "The new system is called Specific Area Message Encoders, or SAME, and instead of everyone in several counties having to listen to a warning that's several counties away, the warning now goes off just in the specific area that may be in harm's way." There are 25 transmitters in Georgia, each with its own listening area, in a cooperative effort between state and federal governments: The state buys the transmitter and NWS maintains and programs it. The tradeoff for a less-than-perfect voice, Taylor added, is that it's anywhere from two to five minutes quicker, which is the whole idea. "It used to be purely computer-generated, but we're now using concatenation," Taylor said. (I checked to be sure I had it right. Concatenation: the process of linking something, in this case words, into a series or chain.) "We have readers recording into a database from Webster's dictionary, a glossary of meteorological terms, geographic terminology, et cetera. Then we're doing different intonations, inflections up or down." Want to cast your vote for the best replacement for Igor? You actually can, at HtmlResAnchor http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/voicesamples.htm. Wish we could leave him a message. I'd like to concatenate, "Good-bye, faithful Igor. Thanks for being there when the thunder rumbles. "
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