Vladimir's depressed. His flat

monotone has become even flatter. He knows his time is running out, I

swear he does.

We first "met" Vladimir

­ a.k.a. Igor, the voice of the National Weather Service ­ about

five years ago when Dave still had his sailboat on Lake Walter F. George.

We listen carefully to weather radio, especially while boating, and our

reaction was the same as that of millions of Americans who puzzled over

the curious accent:

Considering how life-and-death-important

weather warnings can be, why did they hire some guy whose English is ...

well, partly cloudy? This fellow drones on, hour after hour, with the

oddest timing and emphases.

English, you know, has a rhythm

of its own, more pronounced than most European tongues, and Igor never

mastered it. I have a modestly good ear for language, and can spot at

least the best-known accents from western European, a few Asian, Scandinavian

­ but this was clearly none of those. We finally settled on eastern

Europe, Baltic, perhaps, maybe Russian, and that's why we nicknamed him

Vladimir before learning that others called him Igor.

Sooner or later, of course,

those of us who pay attention to weather radio began to catch on that

Igor's voice is computer-generated. "Someone needs to get into that

program and correct some of those odd pronunciations and inflections,"

I told Dave. "If the telephone company can do it, surely NOAA can

too."

(Years ago I was intrigued

to learn that when Southern Bell recorded messages like, "That number

has been changed. The NEW number is 555-8135. Please make a note of it,"

the pitch of the voice when it says "5" at the beginning drops

on the final "5," as a live speaker would lower the end of a

declarative sentence. Igor lacks that finesse.)

Then came a note from my friend

Beth Snipes, former Citizen photographer and alert fellow listener to

weather radio, as well as to National Public Radio.

"Did you happen to catch

'All Things Considered' this evening?" she wrote. "They did

a story about our Vladimir. Apparently the rest of the world calls him

Igor. NOAA has received so many complaints about Vladigor that they are

going to replace the poor guy with a new voice. Seems some folks didn't

like Igor's accent, so the new voice will sound like he's from Cleveland

or something. Anyway, felt sad for old Vlad and knew you'd understand."

I found the story, by Linda

Wertheimer, archived on NPR's Web site, HtmlResAnchor https://www.npr.org/search/ ,

and listened closely. And what I heard made me want to go "meet"

Vladimir/Igor in the flesh, or perhaps I should say, in the chips, while

he was still employed.

Meteorologist-in-charge Lans

Rothfusz warned me I'd be disappointed in Igor, but kindly arranged for

me to meet with Frank Taylor, data acquisition program manager for NWS

in Peachtree City.

Igor is indeed a computer program,

Taylor said, first tested in the Columbus, Ga. area, which explains why

we heard him on Lake Walter F. George several years before his national

debut on Feb. 1, 1999.

Taylor said our guess that

Igor was eastern European was echoed by many other listeners. "We

got comments like, Why are we hiring foreign nationals and then working

them such long hours? Why are we using this Spanish guy?"

"He's not Spanish,"

Taylor and his colleagues would respond. "He's a computer-generated

voice." Then why did the U.S. government buy a Spanish computer?

questioners persisted.

(The process was actually invented

or Norwegian does not surface in Igor's voice.)

So, why is a flat computerized

voice preferable to recording a real, live meteorologist? I asked Taylor.

Seconds count in severe weather

advisories, he said, and now NWS can disseminate information to many different

users (like TV and radio and Igor) simultaneously, from any station. "It

used to require someone to read the information into a recording device

similar to an old eight-track tape player," Taylor said, "and

putting out a warning used to engage as many as 34 buttons.

"The new system is called

Specific Area Message Encoders, or SAME, and instead of everyone in several

counties having to listen to a warning that's several counties away, the

warning now goes off just in the specific area that may be in harm's way."

There are 25 transmitters in Georgia, each with its own listening area,

in a cooperative effort between state and federal governments: The state

buys the transmitter and NWS maintains and programs it.

The tradeoff for a less-than-perfect

voice, Taylor added, is that it's anywhere from two to five minutes quicker,

which is the whole idea.

"It used to be purely

computer-generated, but we're now using concatenation," Taylor said.

(I checked to be sure I had it right. Concatenation: the process of linking

something, in this case words, into a series or chain.) "We have

readers recording into a database from Webster's dictionary, a glossary

of meteorological terms, geographic terminology, et cetera. Then we're

doing different intonations, inflections up or down."

Want to cast your vote for

the best replacement for Igor? You actually can, at HtmlResAnchor https://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/voicesamples.htm .

Wish we could leave him a

message. I'd like to concatenate, "Good-bye, faithful Igor. Thanks

for being there when the thunder rumbles. "

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