Question about TTS quality

[dmanzetti]

Hi,

I have a CRS 3.0.3a with ICD Enh and to build new services we get the Nuance TTS License.

I was very surprised by the poor speech quality of the TTS (too artificial) instead of all the default prompts built-in into the CRS installation (they seems to be from a TTS too).

Do someone know if it is possible to get more quality from Nuance or if I need to do some configurations into the Vocalizer?

The CRS server doesn't have a sound card.

Thanks to all

Daniele

[jasyoung]

The default CRS prompts are not text-to-speech. They are definitely recorded by live human voice talent, and I believe they're recorded by the "Active Voice lady" (no idea what her real name is) who recorded all the messages for the old Active Voice voicemail systems, which subsequently became Cisco Unity. I talked to our local channel rep about this once, and he told me that it's possible to contract that same voice talent through Cisco if you want your custom prompts to exactly match the provided system prompts.

There are various things you can do to get better results from Nuance. You should try to spell things phonetically, the way you want them to sound, if Nuance is mispronouncing words. IPCC Express 3.1(2) ships with the newer Nuance Vocalizer 3.0, which may help if you can upgrade.

[dmanzetti]

Thanks for your interesting,

but I think that is too much to contact the Cisco "system" voice!!

I thought that the voice was artificial and the cause of my TTS poor quality was a misconfiguration.

I tried to contact nuance too, but they didn't respond to me.

About vocalizer 3.0 I tried the demo into the Nuance Website and the voice is a little bit good than 2.0.

Waiting the upgrade to 3.1 I'll try phonetically.

Thanks

Daniele