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Chocolate [soylentnews.org] writes:

Every once in a while a big business decides to pull in the belt another notch, gird the waist tighter, and cut some services. So it is with the Talking Clock that has been available to Australians for 66 years has been ended as part of a Telstra "network technology upgrade" and as part of a desire by Telstra to "transform ourselves into a simpler business [duckduckgo.com]". In the last hours of the service Melbourne musician Ryan Monro, keen to retain the nostalgia two million Australians still used in 2019 before it was shut down, recorded the sound of 'George, the talking clock' as voiced by Richard Peach [wikipedia.org] and in true post-millennium style created an online version of the Australian Talking Clock [abc.net.au] for those who miss the original and to preserve the service for future generations. The main difference is the site, now located at http://1194online.com/ [1194online.com] only speaks the time according to the user's computer clock which means people who have rung the service for decades to check on time changeovers around daylight savings will be out of luck if their computer doesn't sync time properly. George called the service 66 times right before the Talking Clock was turned off permanently to capture all of the iterations of the time before it was silenced forever.

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