FEMA Worries of ‘Unintended Consequences’ of FCC Speech-to-Text EAS Ban
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said an FCC order’s “unintended consequences” could make some emergency alert system messages originated in a FEMA-designed format useless. The agency petitioned the commission to revisit a January order (CD Jan 12 p8) on the new Common Alerting Protocol format to reverse its ban on text-to-speech EAS warnings. By not allowing such warnings where government agencies originating alerts send scripts of the warnings without also transmitting audio, some transmissions may not go through at all and others may only have warning tones and no actual message, the petition said. “No EAS Participants transmit the full detail alert message and the public is left to make life saving decisions based upon a 90-character” alert from participating wireless carriers “alone,” under one scenario.
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Eight companies that make EAS gear or sell services to EAS participants -- which include all radio and TV stations and subscription-video providers -- agreed with FEMA in also seeking changes to the CAP equipment certification order. The ban will mean some messages will have the “attention signal” and other warning tones, “but they will have no information about the nature of the emergency,” the companies said. “The potential for widespread confusion and/or disregard for EAS could be the result.” A spokeswoman for the FCC Public Safety Bureau, which wrote the order, had no comment.
Speech-to-text alerts from three states and the National Weather Service won’t work if the FCC doesn’t reverse the order, FEMA said. Because audio files won’t be sent with those warnings, EAS encoder-decoders that are banned from generating a computer voice reading the warning’s text will have no message to pass on, the agency said. The NWS is the most frequent federal user of EAS, originating perhaps hundreds of messages weekly, an industry executive noted. “Any CAP based alert furnished by the National Weather Service must be ignored by EAS Participant’s CAP-EAS devices unless there is manual intervention at the EAS Participant level,” said FEMA’s petition Monday in docket 04-296 (http://xrl.us/bmxzk5). “Manual intervention is not possible in cases of unattended operation, which is common business practice at most radio stations and some television stations during at least some portion of the broadcast day. This does not serve the public interest."
Alabama and Washington are among the states whose CAP EAS gear doesn’t send audio files, and so if the speech-to-text ban stands, those warnings wouldn’t be heard by listeners and viewers, according to the petition and an equipment-maker executive. Those states would have “to stop using this active, tested method of alerting the public,” FEMA said: “Solutions most likely to appeal to emergency managers with limited resources are the least likely to include referenced file serving capability” so the ban “will have the greatest impact on those jurisdictions with the fewest resources; the ones that need it the most."
The equipment makers and FEMA said the commission shouldn’t have deviated from the implementation guide developed by the EAS-CAP Industry Group (ECIG) in not allowing text-to-speech warnings. There may be a “profound” impact on alert participants and originators if that ban stands, said Alerting Solutions, iBiquity Digital, Monroe Electronics, Sage Alerting Systems and others in a filing posted Tuesday to the docket (http://xrl.us/bmxzmy). “The ECIG Implementation Guidelines advised of the implications of this scenario should there be no audio file imbedded [sic] in a CAP message intended for EAS distribution, and text to speech conversion is also not present,” they said of audio files that are not transmitted by government agencies sending text-to-speech alerts. “The audio output of the device would only consist of the EAS header tones followed by the End of Message tones. There would be no aural (voice) component of the message."
Bandwidth and operational efficiency are reasons to allow text-to-speech, since originators can send complete messages that take less time to produce to EAS participants, who don’t have to download audio from a website, President Harold Price of Sage said. He said only having to write a script and get approval for it means a government agency or other alert originator doesn’t also need an employee to narrate the warning and get it reviewed before sending it out. Text-to-speech uses less bandwidth because every EAS participant getting a particular warning’s script doesn’t also need to get the audio file, Price said. “It significantly speeds up the workflow at the originator ... all they have to do is type in the text and send the CAP alert.” There are trade-offs in using the warnings, noted Price, whose company sells EAS encoder-decoders. “The downside is you have text-to-speech, so it’s a robotic overlord that’s ordering you to take action. It’s not a native speaker that has good audio.”