An Operational Event Announcer for the LHC Control Centre Using Speech Synthesis

The LHC Island of the CERN Control Centre is a busy working environment with many status displays and running software applications. An audible event announcer was developed in order to provide a simple and efficient method to notify the operations team of events occurring within the many subsystems of the accelerator. The LHC Announcer uses speech synthesis to report messages based upon data received from multiple sources. General accelerator information such as injections, beam energies and beam dumps are derived from data received from the LHC Timing System. Additionally, a software interface is provided that allows other surveillance processes to send messages to the Announcer using the standard control system middleware. Events are divided into categories which the user can enable or disable depending upon their interest. Use of the LHC Announcer is not limited to the Control Centre and is intended to be available to a wide audience, both inside and outside CERN. To accommodate this, it was designed to require no special software beyond a standard web browser. This paper describes the design of the LHC Announcer and how it is integrated into the LHC operational environment.