Unity Connection Reads Out Full Extension Number

[ashley.pearce]

Hi,

We're experiencing strange behaviour where Unity Connection reads out the users extension. For example, we have 7 digit extensions within Unity, when i call a users extension it says 'Sorry, extension eight million six hundred and fifty eight thousand two hundred and twenty two....is unavailable'.....is there any way to set this so that is just states the number, eg ' extension eight, six, five, eight, two, two, two....is unavailable'??

Thanks,

Ash.

[David Hailey]

This sounds like a bug.  I've not run across anything like that in several iterations of CUC.  What version are you running?

Hailey

[ashley.pearce]

I agree, as when you ring in for enrollment and you don't record a name it does say you're default greeting will be Extensions X, X, X

......but then when you actual attempt to leave a VM for the user it reverts to saying the full number.

We're on version 7.1.3.10000-68

[ashley.pearce]

Ok i've fixed this issue. Apparently if you have a number in the 'Display Name' field the system will read out the full number. When i removed this field or changed it to the users name the issue was resolved and Unity reverted to reading digit by digit.

[Rob Huffman]

Hey Ash,

Thanks for posting back with your results here

+5 points for this very kind follow-up! I was with Hailey here in

thinking this must be a bug (couldn't find one though and now I know why!).

Cheers!

Rob

[David Hailey]

Yeah, +5 to you for re-posting.  Now that you mention it, that makes sense to me.  This is because in the Admin guide or one of the administration guides for CUC, it states that the display name should always be a descriptive name for the user and is typically a mixture of first and last name.  This is because when you use voice recognition, CUC will try to use the Display Name first and then a concatenation of the First and Last Name for users who DO NOT have a recorded voice name.  When you set Display Name, the caveat is that CUC's voice recognition can have issues or exhibit seemingly odd behavior (such as what you saw, even though it was doing what it's supposed to do) if the Display Name field contains special characters, numbers, or even diacritic marks (which is simply pronunciation marks).  So, if the Display Name is set with a number - it would think of it as a Name vs. an Extension - which is why it read it back to you as one million four hundred eighty six...etc., etc., etc.

Good catch.

Hailey

[ashley.pearce]

I actually thought something similar, i was expecting to find a TTS service that the system was using to read out the alias or something like that but couldn't find it anywhere. Oh well, just hope nobody else gets caught by this.

[lindborg · Accepted solution]

Just to follow up here – the Connection logic for describing an object (a user or a contact in this case) looks like this:

1.       If a recorded name is present, that is used.

2.       If no recorded name then it checks the display name – if it’s not empty (which is legal but weird) then it’s run through the TTS engine – UNLESS the “Use Text to Speech to Read Display Names When No Recording Is Available” option in the advanced conversation settings is unchecked (it’s checked by default).

3.       If the above two fail then it pulls the extension number out and reads it if that is not empty (for a user it can’t be – but for a handler it can).

4.       Finally if all that fails it then pulls the owner of the call handler (3 can’t fail for a user) and uses that.

The TTS engine license changed along the way to allow an unlimited number of sessions – hence the logic change.  Being able to TTS a display name (assuming it’s a meaningful description of the user of course) is much nicer than not being able to identify folks to outside callers for instance – this was a very common complaint in Unity for name lookup handlers – folks wouldn’t record voice names and then we’d have no way to identify them for external callers so they wouldn’t be listed.  No longer an issue.

Anyway – you can disable the TTSing of display names (in recent versions – early 7.x this option was not there) if there’s a need to do that.

[ashley.pearce]

Thanks for the update Jeff. Always good to know the background on why these new 'features' are introduced.

Do you mind sharing with us the steps to disable the TTS'n of Display Name?

[lindborg]

If you go to advanced settings in the SA (near the bottom) and go into the Conversation section you'll find the option to turn this off listed in there - It's on my 8.0 and 8.5 builds - I thought it got added into 7.1(3) but that may not be the case, I don't have one handy to check against.

[lindborg]

yeah, just checked - the advanced setting was added in 8.0 - can't be ported back to 7.x easily because the code changes to get centralized object presentation logic in there were pretty extensive - lots of testing.  So if you're not at 8.0 and you want to turn that off you'll need to get to 8.0 first...