Do you remember the Speaking Clock? Orange will make it disappear permanently

The official Speaking Clock service, which has become almost useless since the emergence of digital technology, will bow out in the coming months.

Considered at one time as a historic monument, a bit like the speakerines that disappeared from our screens in the early 90s, the Talking Clock is in turn living its last hours. Orange announces that it has scheduled its final shutdown at 1^er next July. A look back at its history and the reasons for this end.

The Speaking Clock, a historic service…

The first automated system in the world that gave the time, the Speaking Clock will bow out afterwards, let’s give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, good and loyal service. Accessible from the whole territory via 3699, it will be stopped by the incumbent operator on 1^er July 2022.

The service, an invention of astronomer Ernest Esclangon, then director of the Paris Observatory, was born almost a century ago, in 1933. When it was inaugurated, the Speaking Clock became the first automated system giving French legal time.

Later, Orange became a partner of the Paris Observatory, in 1991 to be exact. That year was marked by the construction of a dedicated infrastructure, capable of ensuring the distribution of legal time in France with an accuracy of around 10 milliseconds. The current Speaking Clock is of the fourth generation. It is based on the coordinated universal time of the Paris Observatory, generated from a set of atomic clocks from the SYRTE laboratory.

… which has lost all purpose

If the Speaking Clock had a real interest and enjoyed a real popularity rating at a certain time, its discontinuation today is justified by several factors. First, the MT20 switches, which appeared in France at the beginning of the 1980s, are at the end of their life, and they constitute essential equipment for the service.

The fall in calls to 3699 – a service billed at 1.50 euros/call plus the price of a call – also explains this stoppage. It’s unclear how busy the service was still, but it must be starving. Above all, we can consider that the multiplication of sources making it possible to tell the time (smartphones, mobiles, computers, tablets and others) with formidable precision and without the constraint of a phone call will have got the better of the Speaking Clock.

If alternative services exist, the Orange Speaking Clock will be replaced, from 1^er July to October 31, 2022, to a voice message broadcast free of charge, indicating to the caller that the service is permanently closed. And since 1^er May, a voice message indicating the upcoming shutdown of the service is already broadcast during a call to 3699.