DAA Cloud

Descriptive Audio for Alerts for Broadcasters

DAA Cloud is an AI-powered cloud-native application, designed to provide television broadcasters with a solution to meet the requirements of FCC regulation 47 C.F.R. § 79.2 - ACCESSIBILITY OF PROGRAMMING PROVIDING EMERGENCY INFORMATION, as described in the 21^ST Century Communication and Accessibility Act 2010.  DAA Cloud addresses the component of this regulation that requires broadcast television stations to provide emergency information (related to life, health, safety and property) in an audible form for the visually impaired. 

When a television station broadcasts non-EAS emergency information (i.e. breaking news, weather alerts, etc.), outside of the scope of normal news programming, the textual content is typically presented in the form of a scrolling crawl. The crawl may be displayed as an overlay on regular programming, or keyed in using special graphics. The DAA system ‘reads’ the text in the crawl, converts it to speech, then makes it audible as a secondary audio program (SAP), satisfying the FCC’s “Audible Crawl Rule” requirement [47 CFR § 79.2(b)(2)(ii)]. The system is also capable of generating the associated on-screen graphics for presenting the information, or it can incorporate graphics generated by third party systems.

An HTML5 graphic template with scrolling text.

Designed for the Cloud, but...

As its name suggests, DAA Cloud is designed for integration into cloud-based broadcast distribution platforms, and although the services are primarily intended for use in the cloud, the system can also be integrated into more conventional, non-cloud-based broadcast infrastructures. In these cases, we typically begin by assessing the current workflow for delivering breaking alerts on-air, then design and implement a solution that integrates seamlessly with minimal disruption to end users.

It's all in the AI..

DAA Cloud makes extensive use of AI when processing breaking news events.  We've  developed two proprietary AI-powered cloud components, which form the core of the system. The first, TTS-TS^TM, is designed for processing text-to-speech and delivering the audio stream to a network endpoint, like an encoder or a muxer. This component provides excellent human-like voice quality and includes an easy to use interface for phonetically adjusting the spelling of words that may be pronounced differently than they are actually spelled. In addition, it’s also capable of translating emergency textual content from one language to another, on the fly. 

The second component, AIrD^TM , provides features for ‘reading’ text from a live crawl, as well as the ability to very accurately identify and describe graphical elements used in breaking news events, in real-time. This component was specifically designed to address the FCC’s requirement for providing aural descriptions of visual, non-textual emergency information content.  On December 20, 2024, the FCC granted a temporary waiver for this requirement, as requested by the NAB. The waiver is due to expire no later than May 27, 2025.  Click the image below to see and hear samples of AIrD in action.

DAA Cloud can very accurately provide audio description of graphical elements used during breaking news events.

For more information or to request a demo, click here