Selecting a speech development method

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Selecting a speech development method

As an application developer, you have several options from which to choose for including speech in your application.

The following options require you to record speech:

Hiring a professional speaker
Purchasing an Avaya custom speech package
Producing self-recorded custom speech with the IVR Designer development tool

The following options do not require you to record speech:

Purchasing the EBS (Enhanced Basic Speech) package
Using TTS (Text-to-Speech)
Sharing speech already recorded in another application
Importing speech from another application

Hiring a professional speaker

Hiring a professional speaker, such as an actor or an announcer, gives you recorded speech of high quality. Consider the following when choosing a professional speaker:

Have all phrases prepared for the speaker to read in advance of the recording session. See Planning the voice script and Writing the voice script for guidelines.
Audition several speakers of both sexes. Record their voices to evaluate the encoded quality.
Ensure that the speaker is able to maintain the following:
- Constant speaking rhythm and general intonation throughout the recording session (this ensures that phrases spoken early in the session result in normal-sounding speech when they are concatenated with phrases spoken later in the session)
- Constant acceptable level of volume
- Clear pronunciation
- Constant orientation and distance from the microphone
Ensure that alphabetic and numeric characters that are to be recorded with rising, medial, and falling inflections are spoken with the appropriate inflections.
Use the same speaker for all speech associated with a specific application.

If you hire a professional speaker, you can edit the speech phrases for the application script. See Editing speech, for more information about editing speech.

Purchasing an Avaya custom speech package

You can purchase a professionally recorded custom speech package from Avaya. You write out the script and Avaya records and digitizes the speech. Custom speech packages are available with both male and female voices. Custom speech contains phrases designed specifically for the application you are developing. For example, "Thank you for calling Avaya," is a custom speech phrase.

An advantage of purchasing a custom speech package from Avaya is that the speakers who record the custom speech phrases are often the same speakers who record the EBS (Enhanced Basic Speech) phrases. Therefore, a continuity can exist among scripts that use both custom and enhanced basic speech.

Producing self-recorded custom speech

IVR Designer allows you to record speech and store it yourself. You may want to begin with the Enhanced Basic Speech phrases mentioned previously. The standard set includes letters and digits in different speaking inflections and many commonly used phrases, such as the words used to speak dates, times, dollar amounts, etc. You can then use the recording capabilities provided with IVR Designer to record your own speech for phrases unique to your application.

Speech recorded with IVR Designer default speech editor is saved in .wav files. However, when these speech files are installed on the Avaya IR system through IVR Designer, they are converted to G.711 coding.

Note:
The quality of speech recorded through IVR Designer is not as high as the quality produced from professionally recorded speech.

Reference

For information on recording speech with IVR Designer, see the Phrase Editor and Audio recording tips topics in the Avaya IVR Designer Help.

Purchasing the EBS (Enhanced Basic Speech) package

You can purchase the professionally recorded EBS (Enhanced Basic Speech) package from Avaya. The EBS package provides the following:

The most commonly used words and phrases, including the letters of the alphabet, pronounced and recorded in rising, falling, and medial inflections
Essential numbers ("zero" through "twenty," "thirty," "forty," "fifty," "sixty," "seventy," "eighty," "ninety," "hundred," "thousand," and "million")
Days of the week
Months of the year
Ordinal numbers 1 through 31 (that is, "1st" through "31st")
The words "dollars" and "cents"

The EBS package speaks information using a variety of built-in speech formats. For example, if you want the system to speak a number using a money format, you might use number phrases followed by the phrase "dollars and," then the number of cents and the phrase "cents." For a complete listing of the available EBS formats, see EBS formats.

Using PTTS (Proxy Text-to-Speech)

The PTTS package is an option that eliminates the need for recording speech. You enter the phrases to be spoken, and PTTS synthesizes the speech.

PTTS functionality is supported through the IVR Designer application development interfaces as well as through TAS script instructions. The talkoff function and other system features for voice response work with PTTS as they work with other speech files.

PTTS, Enhanced Basic Speech, and prerecorded phrases can be used in the same application.

Sharing speech

Sharing speech allows two or more applications to share common speech phrases, only one copy of which exists on your hard disk. If you have more than one application on a system, it will probably be more convenient for you to use the shared speech feature. Sharing speech provides a performance advantage in that shared speech phrases need to be:

Administered and recorded only once
Stored only once, allowing you to conserve disk space

Importing speech

You can import speech phrases from other applications and edit them.

For IVR Designer applications, you can use the Phrase Editor to import the .wav file corresponding to the phrase you want. Then you can edit the phrase with the audio editing application installed on your PC.