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Applications on the Avaya IR system determine how callers are greeted and prompted for information or choices. Greetings and prompts may be played using recorded messages or Text-to-Speech (TTS), which converts text phrases to spoken phrases.
TTS allows you to include speech in an application using ASCII text as input. The text is converted to synthesized speech. TTS can also convert text retrieved from a database or host. TTS application development is supported by IVR Designer.
TTS is an alternative to using prerecorded phrases for voice response. It can be essential in some applications that must speak dynamic text (for example, names and addresses) and that have large amounts of speakable text (for example, electronic news). Without TTS, these types of applications can require many hours of recording and much disk space. These applications can also use TTS for static text for consistency.
The TTS technology can distinguish between different classes of text, such as zip codes and telephone numbers, and pronounces the text string in the appropriate spoken format. When constructing speech, parameters such as pitch and duration are adjusted to make the outcome sound more natural. The ASCII text is preprocessed to expand abbreviations. For example, "Dr." is expanded to "doctor" or "drive," depending on the context.
Speech processing is done using one or more auxiliary computers connected to the Avaya IR system through a proxy interface.
