Voice Tag

We tried the Cepstral Allison voice. I’ve attached a screenshot of the voice settings with speed set to Max Slow. Even with this speed setting the numeric playback was still fast. Is there a setting that I’m missing or have misconfigured to slow this voice down?

Voicent gateway does not set the speed for TTS engine. So the system will choose whatever the default speed. For almost all TTS engines, the default speed is the best. so far we have not seen any reason to change the default speed.

One possible setting issue is that telephony audio needs to be 8KHz, so please make sure the capstrial voice is set to produce the correct frequency.

I was referring to the playback speed of variable data that has been entered into the IVR. The voice is an 8KHz voice but I need to slow down the playback of the data that the caller has entered into the IVR (e.g. dates). We have confirmation prompts that playback things like “You entered 01072010”. The “You entered” is a prerecorded wav file and the “01072010” is TTS generated. The “01072010” is playing back very quickly.

For reading numbers, do not completely rely on the TTS. You should tag the tts text. You can do that in IVR studio, just select the TTS prompt, and click the Prompt Type button, then set it as “character” or other tags that fixs your situation. If you do not use tags, you can introduce spaces in between the digits like: “0 1 0 7 2 0 1 0″, this will slow down the TTS reading of the digits.

We tried using the Voice Tag and got an error message when the IVR attempted to playback the Date. Note, I’m asking the caller to enter the date in an 8 digit numeric field and then I play it back using TTS. It is stored as VG_Last_Result. The error that we get is “Sorry the system cannot continue due to error. Please Try later.” It sounds like it is being read by the Voicent voice. It happens only when I use the date tag. My guess is that since the numeric entry of 8 digits doesn’t have any delimiters, the IVR tag can’t read it as a date. Is that true?

Yes, the system is expecting a date field of the format: MM/dd/yyyy. The format is listed in the Set Prompt Type window. Without the delimiters, it cannot be parsed as date.

All you need to do is to create another IVR action to convert the value, then use the converted value for audio prompt.

To allow user to specify the input format seems to be a good enhancement candidate for the voice tag feature. We’ll include that feature in our future release.