Recording Phone Narration

[OSV]

Dear Plum:

I have read through the documentation on how to upload, and record our own narration for the phone survey, however, I noticed that when I use the phone to record the survey, it does not give me the chance to record my own voice for the selection options.

When hearing the survey through the testing option I hear my voice say the choice, "if it was to place an order", and then the TTS comes on to say press 1.

How can I get it to where my voice can say press 1 and eliminate the TTS all together in the survey?

Thank you,
OSV

[support]

Hi OSV,

On your IVR survey, if you want to eliminate the TTS for phrases such as "press 1", try looking farther on in your list of phrases in the IVR audio manager. The IVR audio manager breaks down your phrases into separate pieces so that you can reuse portions that are repeated many times.

You should be able to record audio for this phrase fragment using the same IVR features you used to record other prompts. There is more information in the online Plum IVR Survey documentation. You can also choose to mute this phrase, if you want to include the speech for "press 1" in the recording for the choice text itself.

Hope this helps.

[OSV]

Dear Plum,

We just recorded our phone narration to our survey, when listening through I noticed that at the end of our last rating question there is a long break of silence, almost a minute before it moves to the "contact info page"; this has caused many individuals helping us test out the system to hang up early because they thought the survey was over.

I have made several clones of the same survey to make adjustments to see if I could figure out a solution but I am coming up short.

How do I shorten the lag time between recorded prompts? I was looking through the documentation and came across Recording Repository, but I was not sure if that was a feature I had access to since we will be going with a hosting agreement, instead of purchasing the platform.

Any insight you could provide would be wonderful and if you need more information from my end please let me know.

Thank you,
OSV

[support]

Hi,

Thanks for your inquiry.

We're currently looking into this IVR issue that you have described. Does this lag time only occur at this location of the IVR survey (before you reach the contact info page)? OR does it occur in other locations of the IVR survey.

Also, could you provide us with some timestamps of when you experienced this IVR issue? This would help us greatly in reproducing and debugging this IVR issue.

Regards,
Plum Support

[OSV]

Hello Support,

The big lag happens only when it goes from our very last question to the Contact Page. As for timestamps of when this issue happened it would have been this call attempt:
inbound 2603593897 2 [06/Aug/2009:13:00:13 -0500] 6177123585 000001;002;1249576486 1249578013 1249578402 6:29
local 2603593897 2 [06/Aug/2009:13:06:42 -0500] 6177123585 000001;002;1249576486 SURVEY-SAVED Survey saved...

There are brief lags in between the recorded prompts example being "To Select" (lag) "option/choice" (lag) "Press 1" but this happens throughout the survey. Is there any way to shorten the small lags in these areas? Would we need to use a different way to record our survey like uploading audio files, or using the Recording Repository feature?

Hope this helps & thank you,
OSV

[support]

Hi,

We have confirmed the long load times that you have described. We're going to look into ways to improve load performance on pages with many complex IVR grammars. As some background to the IVR issue, having many questions on the same page from the full name, full address, and city/state types requires the loading of a few hundred megabytes of grammars into our IVR grammar engine, which is the reason for the delay.

While we look into improvements we can make, we recommend that you try to break up the name and street address questions into separate pages so that the loading time for those IVR grammars does not take as long. Having these questions on separate pages will only load one of the IVR grammars at a time so the delays will be shorter.

Regards,
Plum Support

[OSV]

Dear Support,

Thank you for all your help, we will take your suggestions into consideration as we move forward with our survey.

Sincerely,
OSV