The actual name of the company who has been making the Audichron (TM) "systems" since the beginning of telephone voice announcements is named ETC and is located just around the corner from Appleton, WI, in Waukesha. This is still a family owned company (Danner family) who I believe is in its third generation since opening back in 1949. I worked with this company back in the 90's for a couple of years. I no longer have any association with them so this info is purely from memory and from their web site.
Their business through these almost 60-years has always been audio related.
As I recall, ETC "owned" most of the Time and Weather telephone numbers (WE-6-1212 and ME-6-1212) in most MSA's and leased them to either the local Teleco or to a local business who sponsored the services. There were all sorts of sponsors (including the bank mentioned) like car dealers and so on.
According to their web site describing this "service"
It was interesting in that I remember they had a small museum of sorts at their headquarters in WI where they had early models of their Audichron announcers and other products including an early telephone answering/announcing device which attached (in the days before the BellSystem would "allow" direct electrical connection) to the phone via a an electro-mechanical unit. This unit, in which the phone set (remember the 500 Sets?) took the phone "off-hook" via a hardware device (would lift up allowing the "hook switch" buttons to rise) operated by a magnetic solenoid which was activated by a listening device which "heard" the bell ring and turned on. The handset was placed in a holding fixture which looked like the early mechanical modem connection "hood" so the ear-piece was placed adjacent to a microphone and the mouth-piece was placed next to a speaker. Thus the unit with a tape recording device in it, both recorded the caller's message and announced what ever the owner desired.
They are also one of the two sources for the Telco's switch controlled Voice Intercept systems. These are the CO switch mounted/connected voice responders which speak the special voice announcements we have all heard like, "I'm sorry but the number you have dialed has been changed or disconnected...." The units take their cue from the switch for all the necessary voice output. All of their units have had history of on-the-job 25-year life spans which Ma Bell required of anything they purchased. Early units (before digital technology) didn't use conventional tape or wire playback machines but had the phrases mechanically stored (too long a story for this space!)
The company's history is additionally quite interesting in that they had in their employ for many years the two persons' who voiced all of the messages, both male and female, which were heard on just about every Bell company system (RBOC's) and even later on many of the CLEC switches too. Over the years all of the words numbers and phrases have been recorded and digitized but are still the same people's voices today. The modern technology has made it such that the output of these systems sounds as if a human is doing the speaking while it is all digital from a "box"!
Perhaps if one were interested in how many Time/Weather systems ETC has out there, they might give them a call. I'm sure that ETC would give a pretty good "ball-park" number of how many are in service (it's a marketing thing!)
Telecom Digest Temporary Moderator wrote:
As I recall, the CO switches (#5's and Nortel switches) all had pretty reliable time standards built into them for PSTN synchronization. Without the extremely accurate time, the signals between switches would be out of sync. Believe in later years, this time signal was derived from GEOS satellites (the ones which we get GPS signals from).So the Telco's could "sell" their time sync to customer's but it did not come from the Audichron device.
In fact the time accuracy for the Time/Weather system is sync'ed each time ETC uploads new weather data (via the phone line) to the customer located unit (see their web site.)