Ordnance Survey - Britain's 220-year-old tech company; Launching synthetic voices and personality test

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2020

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the past 220 years, Ordnance Survey have been mapping Great Britain with extraordinary accuracy. But as Gareth discovers when he visits their HQ in Southampton, GB's master map is not a static printed document. It's a 2 petabyte database which is updated up to 20,000 times a day. This adds up to 360 million updates a year. Since the development of the theodolite and the first detailed map in 1801 of the county of Kent, Ordnance Survey have used cutting edge technology, not only to map our lands, but to manipulate, understand and ask questions of the geography of our natural landscapes and built environment. Voices on the train, public address announcements at the station, automated telephone banking, Alexa and Siri. We are surrounded by electronic voices. But very little research has been done of how we respond to synthetic speech. To investigate the impact of artificially generated voices in our lives, BBC R&D together with our favourite acoustic engineer, Professor Trevor Cox of the University of Salford, has just launched a study. The Synthetic Voices and Personality Test, is an online test we want you to take part in. Please go to https://voicestudy.api.bbc.co.uk and have a listen Presenter Gareth Mitchell Producer - Fiona Roberts

Transcript

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0:40.0	Greetings everyone, this is the podcast edition of BBC Inside Science for
0:44.9	Thursday the 13th of February 2020 and this isn't Adam Rutherford it's me
0:49.5	Gareth Mitchell on science duties for this week and I was just about to settle into Adam's
0:54.1	luxurious seat with commanding views across the B.H. Plaza over to the
0:58.2	one show studio when producer Fee thrust some tickets at me and said we're going to Southampton. I didn't even have time to write
1:06.0	you can follow me on Twitter via at Gareth M on the script. Now you may have noticed that I am a bit of a technology nerd so I was always going to enjoy this day out.
1:16.5	Fee even buys her presenter's sandwiches too. Yummy.
1:19.5	Anyway, listen and enjoy. I did.
1:23.0	Hello, today, pals or imposters. How do we respond to artificial voices?
1:30.6	But before that, a story of drones, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, Gandalf staffs, yes,
1:37.0	very high-tech ones, and much more. I'm at a 220-year-old tech company, and it's one you might just have heard of
1:44.6	its Ordnance Survey and I'm here at their Southampton headquarters with Carl Wilson who's
1:49.8	a geospatial specialist here so you're hardly a startup are you Carl so where did it
	...

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