WorldDAB – the global industry forum for DAB+ digital radio – has produced new guidelines for broadcasters and manufacturers on the use of phonemes and aliases, which allow listeners to find their favourite stations using voice commands more easily.

The new easy-to-follow, 18-page “how-to” guide is aimed at broadcasters and those who work in radio stations, to help them check if their phonemes are correct. 

There is increasing use by listeners of voice commands to navigate radio stations, particularly as the list of stations is becoming much longer. Smart speakers and virtual assistants use voice recognition to understand what is said to them, and voice reproduction to confirm choices and results to users in natural language.

Many typical words and phrases can be represented by plain text. But two situations are not well handled: when listeners often call a radio station by something other than its exact official name, and when a radio station name isn’t said the same way as it is written down in text. Aliases and phonemes can help listeners find radio stations in these cases.