ATCA Bulletin

March 2004

Victoria, BC, - STR-SpeechTech Ltd. has been awarded a contract with the US FAA to provide a system that will automatically generate TWEB (Transcribed Weather Broadcast Service) forecasts, which are broadcast to pilots by the FAA at Automated Flight Service Stations in Alaska. The system provides pilots with a continuous broadcast of weather information. The StarCaster® TWEB system will replace the existing system, a very labor-intensive service that up until now was manually recorded by FAA personnel. The system will use STR's Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology for message broadcasting. The StarCaster TWEB System will automatically collect, filter, sort, verify and store text data, and then automatically process the text data into voice output ready for broadcast. A proven, cost-effective solution that will reduce the FAA's cost of maintaining the TWEB service. The TWEB system in the FAA Alaska Region is similar to the HIWAS (Hazardous Inflight Weather Advisory Service) provided in the lower 48 U.S. states.