[Asterisk-Users] About the weather..

[Steve Prior]

Matt Riddell wrote:

> dean collins wrote:
> 
>> There is a script on the asterisk at home sourceforge list that reads the
>> weather for you.
>>
>> Basically ftp's a text file from the BOM and then uses festival to read
>> it out to you
> 
> 
> :)
> 
> Yeah but he doesn't want to use festival.  He wants to use the recorded 
> prompts by Allison.
> 
> I guess you could parse the text to look for cloudy/sunny/raining etc 
> and then use that to form the playback statement.

The festival approach is required when you use the National Weather Service
text forecasts which are less formally written and meant to be read by a
human - I did a survey of the kind of language used in them a while back and
they contain all sorts of "fuzzy" language which is hard to interpret by
computer.

The recorded prompts by Allison are more in line with the very language structured
text forecasts typically seen by pilots - I'm not sure what feeds for this type
are available.  Also the National Weather Service now has highly structured XML
forecasts available which while being more work to deal with the XML should be
much easier to automatically interpret and use the appropriate recordings.  I
believe they use a SOAP API for the data and there was a bit of a stir when they
first started making this data available from other companies who charged for
this kind of information and didn't like the idea of the government freely
distributing what the citizens had already paid for (no bias here...).
I looked at working with this data feed a while back, but didn't have time then
and haven't gotten back to it yet.

Steve