The incompitentency of the Daley Administration with the new 911 system has
been well documented.  The latest twist was the need to upgrade speech
synthesizers.  Apparently, the Fire department was using one like we use.
It seems that the fireman couldn't understand it, hence the upgrade.  I
wonder if we will get such an upgrade with natural sounding synthesizers.

kelly


Fire dispatch system gets new voice

   April 13, 1999

   BY FRAN SPIELMAN CITY HALL REPORTER

   A computer-generated voice that relays emergency dispatches to Chicago
   firehouses has been replaced by a voice that sounds human, eliminating
   the last major kink at Chicago's 911 emergency center.

   The new voice is also generated by a computer, but you'd never know
   it, according to Glen ``Skip'' Funk, director of the city's Office of
   Emergency Communications. It sounds just like a woman's voice that's
   clear as a bell and easy to understand.

   With the old voice dispatch, when word went out on the loudspeaker
   that there was a fire at a particular address, nobody in the firehouse
   was ever sure where they were expected to go.

   ``It was very difficult to understand,'' Funk said Monday. ``As much
   as we did to the old voice to try to make it clearer, it just wasn't
   enough. We had to put that aside and put a better voice in. ... It's a
   [computer] generated voice, but ... it's as clear as you talking to
   me.''

   The new voice was created by a California company called Locution Inc.
   The cost was not available.

   Fire equipment is dispatched from the 911 emergency center through a
   dual-track system that includes written instructions over an alarm
   terminal and an audio message over a loudspeaker piped into the
   firehouse. When firefighters have to stop to check an address,
   valuable time is lost.

   The new voice system eliminates the last major kink in a $217 million
   911 system plagued at the outset by major problems.

   For the first two years, the Fire Department continued to dispatch
   emergency vehicles manually because of a shortage of personnel and
   persistent problems with computer software.

   In 1997, an exasperated Mayor Daley hired Funk, a retired U.S. Navy
   commander, to correct the system's problems.

   Dispatchers and call takers were hired. A room where alarms from 1,622
   schools, hospitals and nursing homes are received was monitored
   round-the-clock, instead of being unstaffed overnight. Automatic
   vehicle locator devices were installed in 318 Fire Department
   vehicles.

   And city contractors engineered a software fix to make fire call boxes
   compatible with the integrated mapping system that's the guts of
   computer-aided dispatch. Fire equipment went online in May 1997, and
   ambulance service followed a month later. While a system that fields
   12,000 emergency calls each day and 3.8 million a year is never
   perfect, the major hurdles have been cleared, officials said.

   Now all that remains is a $5 million fix to make the entire system
   Year 2000 compliant and an aggressive marketing campaign to persuade
   Chicagoans to call 311 for non-emergencies. The 311 roll-out--complete
   with billboards, commercials and public service announcements--is
   scheduled to begin next month.

   Asked if he planned to stick around to run the system now that it's
   running relatively smoothly, Funk said, ``Well, I don't know. I can't
   answer that.''


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