AIRPORTVOICE
OVERVIEW
Public Address system designed by Software Design, named AirportVoice, aims to disseminate to public and staff, by means of a sophisticated audio distribution system, operational and security messages, entertainment and advertisement audio channels in the airport areas.
The Airport Public Address System represents an important element to reach optimal quality targets related to public information.
The system has been conceived to allow airports to accomplish the following objectives:
- Improve the effectiveness of flight information services by means of an automatic presentation of most relevant flight events
- Centrally manage the distribution of information in all airport areas
- Propose new type of audio information, such as advertisement channel and news
The system manages multiple broadcast channels thanks to the features of automatic and manual selection of the areas to be served.
The channels can be subdivided as follows:
- Automatic messages on FIDS event
- Timed automatic messages
- Operator communications
- Advertising & Entertainment channels
The system is based on advanced TTS technology enabling real time audio transformation of flight events coming from the Flight Information Display System with a very impressive quality and for all languages needed.
AirportVoice is highly scalable allowing the use of audio boards rather than audio matrix. In the latter option the system can be enriched with :
- Broadcast background music when no messages are played
- Make available high quality microphones to Customer Service and other Front Handling operators
- Make available zone selective microphones to Customer Service Coordination offices
- Improve sound quality using ambient noise detection to maintain a constant proportion between signal and background noise of the selected environment
BENEFITS
The use of this product allows the airport to:
“use the same voice for all audio communications without expert speakers”
“to reach high levels of quality in dispatching messages as each message can be reproduced at any time and with the desired languages applicable to each specific event”
SOLUTION COMPONENTS
AUDIO CHANNEL CONFIGURATION AND IMMEDIATE MESSAGES
The audio channels configurator allows to define both all the available audio channels and their association with airport areas served by connected the addressing systems.
Immediate Messages
The system allows the management of immediate message to playback operator messages using TTS technology. In particular, immediate message function simplify generation of messages related to unexpected event or special on the fly announcement :
- create a free text new message
- exploit the structure of an existing message structures modifying desired fields
- select the language and the airport area where the message must be played
- play locally text-to-speech to verify quality of message if needed
- play the message in the airport areas selected
Message prepared can also be tuned by working on several parameters such as volume and frequency.
MESSAGE CONFIGURATION AND PRESENTATION MODULE
The system allows the configuration of single messages through:
- flight event associated to the message
- number of retries and wait interval between one and another
- time of presentation for messages not linked to any flight through the definition of a time slot, number of repetitions and their interval
- a metalanguage which defines the message structure and the related voice segments associated to the single parts of the structure
- the airport areas involved in the message dispatching
- The applicable languages
The above-mentioned parameters can be further filtered according to the needs of the single carrier for the messages linked to flight events.
Messages not linked to events can be associated into programs. A program essentially allows to define a timeline for pre-recorded messages such as “Please do not smoke” and “Please do not leave your baggage unattended”, which are regularly broadcast at scheduled times.
PRESENTATION MODULE
The presentation module consists of a voice server which broadcasts both the active program messages and the messages coming from the gateway and related to flight events.For each message, the server:
- builds the message on the basis of the associated metastructure and languages
- dispatches the message to the audio channels corresponding to the airport areas in which the message shall be broadcasted
- scheduling of required retries
FLIGHT EVENTS GATEWAY
The system is able to acquire all the flight events generated by the flight datasources of the FIND module. The system manages both arrivals and departures flight information.
The arrivals management includes the following events:
- UNDEFINED DELAY
- ESTIMATED TIME of ARRIVAL (ETA)
- TOUCH-DOWN TIME
- FLIGHT CANCELLATION
- DETOUR TO ANOTHER AIRPORT
- DETOUR FROM ANOTHER AIRPORT
The departures management includes the following events:
- ESTIMATED TIME OF DEPARTURE (ETD)
- IMMEDIATE BOARDING
- LAST CALL
- FLIGHT CANCELLATION
SYSTEM MONITORING
The monitoring system allows to:
- visualize the list of all the voice messages broadcasted
- visualize the timeline of the messages of the current active program
- activate a program selected among all those configured, through the use of special function keys provided by Airport Voice
- select a program message and require its immediate broadcasting
