Depends on how much money you want to spend and how often the prompts will change. If the prompts change all the time, go with a TTS voice. If the prompt will never change you should probably get a professional recording.
On a related not there still is not a decent mechanism for recording IVR prompts in sipX. When you have 30 IVR's like I will in about 6 months it tends to get difficult to manage the recordings. If end users could actually record prompts for specific IVR's then this issue would be solved and I wouldn't have to babysit them to record changes. I am contemplating writing an Asterisk application to record IVR prompts much like I did for "serial paging" (to get around the ~25 user limitation of the paging system in sipX). I don't think I've posted it but essentially it's a couple of PHP scripts that allow you to record a message and then once you are finished recording Asterisk dials each page group defined in the PHP file in sequential order. If anyone is interested I can post a wiki page. Josh Patten Assistant Network Administrator Brazos County IT Dept. (979) 361-4676 On 4/20/2010 8:52 AM, Francis Tinio wrote: > Thanks. > > On a side note, are you going to implement Cepstral to use for incoming > operator greetings as well? Or for that part still advisable to purchase real > voice over? > > I'm contemplating whether to use a speech synthesis or a real live recording. > > > On Apr 20, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Josh Patten wrote: > > >> The only way you're going to get truly human sounding voices is when a human >> records them. Any text to speech voice is going to require some tweaking to >> sound human. The AT&T voices may have been a bad example, I'm sure there are >> better ones out there. Download a demo of cepstral and play with the voices. >> They can be made to sound pretty good. >> >> Josh Patten >> Assistant Network Administrator >> Brazos County IT Dept. >> (979) 361-4676 >> >> >> On 4/20/2010 8:45 AM, Francis Tinio wrote: >> >>> those are computer voices similar to AT&T's natural voices right? How do >>> they compare to an actual voice over of a real person? I've heard demos of >>> the AT&T and at time it sounded robotic. >>> >>> >>> On Apr 20, 2010, at 9:29 AM, Josh Patten wrote: >>> >>> >>> >>>> In my experience people are VERY turned off by the free ones, such as >>>> those provided by festival and eSpeak. I even went to all the trouble of >>>> installing . We are planning to purchase cepstral voices for both >>>> english and spanish. Though they aren't the best voices available, they >>>> are much less expensive than something like AT&T natural voices. The >>>> redistribution license (note this is different from a concurrency >>>> license) and 3 voices costs something like $290 and the nice thing about >>>> cepstral is it supports SSML: http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/ so >>>> you can easily control how the voice sounds. I even went to all the >>>> trouble of installing HTS voices: >>>> http://hts.sp.nitech.ac.jp/?Voice%20Demos with Festival and still could >>>> not get it to sound human because of the intonation issues with >>>> Festival. eSpeak has a much better intonation engine but the voices >>>> sound stifled and robotic and the HTS voices only work with Festival. >>>> >>>> Josh Patten >>>> Assistant Network Administrator >>>> Brazos County IT Dept. >>>> (979) 361-4676 >>>> >>>> >>>> On 4/20/2010 8:22 AM, Francis Tinio wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>>> Hey. >>>>> >>>>> Just want some feedback on which company you guys use for IVR recordings? >>>>> We currently have a live attendant configured but would be changing to >>>>> IVR soon. Anyone care to share their thoughts on this? >>>>> >>>>> You use free IVR responses voice overs or professional paid? >>>>> >>>>> Thanks >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> sipx-users mailing list sipx-users@list.sipfoundry.org >>>>> List Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/sipx-users >>>>> Unsubscribe: http://list.sipfoundry.org/mailman/listinfo/sipx-users >>>>> sipXecs IP PBX -- http://www.sipfoundry.org/ >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> sipx-users mailing list sipx-users@list.sipfoundry.org >>>> List Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/sipx-users >>>> Unsubscribe: http://list.sipfoundry.org/mailman/listinfo/sipx-users >>>> sipXecs IP PBX -- http://www.sipfoundry.org/ >>>> >>>> >>> >>> > _______________________________________________ sipx-users mailing list sipx-users@list.sipfoundry.org List Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/sipx-users Unsubscribe: http://list.sipfoundry.org/mailman/listinfo/sipx-users sipXecs IP PBX -- http://www.sipfoundry.org/
