Friday fragments - comms news from around the web for 16 May 2014

A round-up of the week's critical communications and public safety radio news for Friday, 16 May 2014.

Text-to-speech 911. A text-to-speech alert system at an emergency comms centre in Southern Oregon is saving precious seconds by “sending automated broadcasts to fire stations while dispatchers are still on the phone with callers".

Public safety demos on LTE network. Attendees at the 2014 Texas Emergency Management Conference will get a chance to see on-demand interagency communication and information sharing solutions on the Public Safety LTE Band 14 broadband network. Technologies on show will include secure PTT with video over mobile devices and Google Glass wearable multimedia devices.

Tait presents podcasts. Tait Radio has begun a series of podcasts. The first one features Dave Slaten and Geoff Peck speaking about vehicle area networks.

Simoco opens KL office. Simoco has opened an office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The company presently does 54% of its business in the international market and expects the new Asian regional hub to increase that to 75% in the next three years.

Unbreakable secure comms. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Raytheon BBN Technologies think they've come up with a system to securely transmit information with no possibility of anyone hacking into it - not even the NSA.

Emergency radio for the deaf. Emergency weather radios for the deaf and hard of hearing will be on display at a technology expo in the US in June. The units have a strobe light and vibrating bed shaker, which alert the user to turn on the television to read captioned weather broadcasts.

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