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Comment by rafaele | Hacker News Reader

Cool! Hey I have a feature request: Could you add the robotic voices?

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309

When Noisebridge was new, I wrote a program to get the BART arrival times and play them (in a synthesized voice as close as I could find to the BART one, though clearly not the same one) through the loudspeakers at the space during the last half hour or so of BART service every night. Unfortunately, other people found this annoying, so it was disabled very quickly.

When was Noisebridge new? I started going around 2010/11

About 2008.

In my case my nostalgia is tied to the bubbly incoherent voice that says (in astonishingly clear manner) what train arrives first and then proceeds to say which platform and which track, which is so indistinguishable that you never know where to run to (before we had BARTs in the underground passage we used to check all the platforms, because there might have been a change)

I love how long the terrible speech synthesis on BART lasted. I don't mean this in a negative way at all. BART was so state of the art when it was built, that it still feels like the future today. They did a good job on ... everything.

Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.

Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips, so I'm surprised BART chose this synthesized system. Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vW3hheSml3Q

  Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips

BART did too. I think the announcements date back to the early days of BART. The computerized text-to-speech didn't come around until 2000 and only cover train arrivals.

  Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?

BART's always gone for style over substance, so yeah that probably played a part in it. There's a small chance that text-to-speech was cheaper than paying a human.

In San Francisco, Muni paid a Texan to record stop announcements for their buses. I've absolutely no idea how this ended up being the case but she absolutely massacred the pronunciation of a few (mostly Spanish) words.

  They did a good job on ... everything.

Nah, they did a good job on one thing: PR. As public transit? We've been suffering the consequences of their chronic NIH for going on fifty years now.

  Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go
  find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.

BART's covered the topic of their computerized voices a few times. This was the first I found, but they've covered it more recently with the arrival of their newer trains.

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309

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