Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Software to Improve Clarity of Announcements

As many people know, with all the noise and commotion that goes on in a railway station, it is often times hard to hear important information being announced. In a recent article, a solution is provided so that the clarity of the announcements can be improved and therefore information will be heard better.
            One point that I would like to emphasize that this article has discussed is the fact that the noise in railway stations drowns out the announcement that is being made. The article brought up the fact that the passengers only understand a part of the announcement. They may hear the beginning of the announcement, but they may not hear the end of it. For example, the announcement may start to tell passengers what platform they need to go to , but with the surrounding noise, the passengers might miss the end of the announcement because they weren’t able to hear it clearly. Secondly, I would like to emphasize how they plan on improving the clarity of the announcements. This will be accomplished by using the pitches and frequencies and adjust them so that passengers will be able to hear information in a clearer way. I think that by using this strategy of adjusting the pitches and frequencies of certain words and letters, it will be very beneficial. As the article mentioned, making the volume for announcements louder will not necessarily improve the clarity. Speech is a lot more complex than just making the volume louder, so therefore I believe that analyzing and working with the pitches and frequencies of words will provide a better and a more satisfying outcome. Thirdly, I would like to emphasize how this new software can be used for calls on mobile phones, speaker systems in airports and conference equipment. This will be very useful for members of businesses so that workers will be able to communicate in a clear and effective way.

        The article raised some concerns as well. For one, there is always the risk of the new software not being fully effective. If they didn’t work as well as the company anticipated, then how would the quality of announcements improve? Secondly, since it can be used with mobile phones and in conference equipment as well, the person on the other line may not have the same software. Therefore, would this innovation be beneficial to both ends or to just the member with the new software? Lastly, while devices such as phones and conference equipment already have what it needs to record ambient noise, speaker systems in railway stations and airports would still need to implement additional microphones in order to pick up the ambient noise. As a result, this would be an additional expense and would cost more money to install.

1 comment:

  1. I think it is super important that this technology is being developed because commuter stations are one of the most confusing places to hear important announcements. Whether it be a bus station, train station, or airport, most of the time the announcements that are made are not coherent and that messes up everybody's travel plans. I think it is very important to realize just making announcements louder does not actually help the problem of hearing the announcement better. There is a lot of factors that go into understanding speech like pitch and frequency to help our ears hear things more clearly. I agree that one really big concern is cost because to really help commuters we must implement this technology in all travel stations which can be really expensive. Although it is helpful sometimes it may seem like more work to try and fix this problem but I think it is worth it to help traveling run more smoothly.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.