The Contact provides an integrated text-to-speech engine that may be used for two purposes:
- Administrators at all system-login levels can use the text-to-speech engine “offline” to quickly create announcements by typing in text rather than uploading audio files to the system. The system then generates audio files that can be used in call flows. While text-to-speech does not provide the quality of professionally-recorded announcements, it does allow administrators to rapidly create time-sensitive audio, such as emergency announcements.
- Agents handling customer calls can use the text-to-speech engine during a call to read out booking confirmations, such as repeating back a customer number that has been entered through DTMF, or standard responses from a knowledgebase.
Text-to-speech may be powered by one of two Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems, depending on how your Contact is configured at installation: either MaryTTS or Nuance.
The text-to-speech engine supports English, German and Spanish languages. The language may be selected through the user interface. Administrators can configure the text-to-speech engine for each language, specifying parameters such as whether it is a male or female voice, tempo and pitch. Different voices per language are also supported.