It is now possible to access up-to-the-minute traffic updates via the SABC’s “News Break” service.
By dialling 082 152 (for News Break) and choosing option 3 (traffic) users will connect to a “service within a service” that will allow them to hear a list of incidents affecting the flow of traffic on the country’s roads, on a 24/7 basis.
The traffic service will allow users to select the province for which they wish to hear traffic updates. For those provinces with the heaviest traffic, sub-choices will allow the user to make sub-choices as follows:-
- in Gauteng:
- greater Johannesburg
- Centurion and Pretoria
- Gauteng highways (i.e. national [“N”] roads, motorways [“M” roads] and “R” roads)
- in the Western Cape:
- Greater Cape Town
- major routes outside the greater Cape Town area
- in KwaZulu-Natal:
- Greater Durban
- Major routes outside the greater Durban area
The traffic service has been made possible by collaboration between the SABC’s “Traffic Watch” team headed-up by Rob Byrne, Marketel (who operate the NewsBreak service on behalf of the SABC), NGN Telecoms (who are responsible for the integration of the traffic service into NewsBreak); Vodacom who host the NewsBreak service and the SABC's New Media Unit in News..
Because of the volume of incidents being processed by the Traffic Watch team, it is necessary to use advanced ‘text-to-speech’ conversion, and because the unique pronunciation associated with so many street and place names in South Africa, it has been necessary to build up a special ‘phonetic library’ of these words for the text-to-speech process. This library is being added to on a continual basis.
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