British English

[Bertrand]

Hi,

I'm new to PlumVoice and am writing a 1st application to test/validate the platform.
I'm fairly familiar with Voxeo and hope Plum will be just as good (or even better...).

At the moment I am struggling to activate British English and I do get weird results.

I tried xml:lang="en-uk" both in <speak> and <voice> tags followed by name="audrey" for the voice tag but never got any success.

The simple code below doesn't even work.

.....
<form id="Welcome">
<block>
<prompt bargein="false">
<voice xml:lang="en-uk" name="audrey" gender="female">
Hello world!
</voice>
</prompt>
</block>
</form>
.....

I also tried
.....
<speak xml:lang="en-uk"><voice name="audrey" gender="female">
Hello world!
</voice></speak>
....

but neither did work.

I have a couple of questions then:
1) why is the code above not processed as expected ?
2) what difference does it make to specify xml:lang in <speak> vs. <voice> ?
3) My application configuration indicates: ASR Engine = Nuance OSR 3.0 and TTS = AT&T Natural Voices 1.4. Can I change either/both of them for alternatives listed in Chapter 4 (Cepstral or RealSpeak) ?

Thanks,
Bertrand

[support]

Hi,

Both versions of the IVR code you posted above work correctly. We placed this code into a scratchpad:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<vxml version="2.0">
<form id="Welcome">
<block>
<prompt bargein="false">
<voice xml:lang="en-uk" name="audrey" gender="female">
Audrey should be speaking British English.
</voice>
</prompt>

<prompt>
<speak xml:lang="en-uk">
<voice name="audrey" gender="female">
Verify that both versions of this code work.
</voice>
</speak>
</prompt>
</block>
</form>
</vxml>

The TTS engine rendered both sentences in British English.

The only reason to use the speak tag would be when using the Nuance Realspeak engine. This TTS engine requires this tag while the other two engines do not.

The Nuance OSR 3.0 is our recommended ASR engine.

Demo accounts are limited to using AT&T Natural Voices. Production accounts have access to all 3 engines within a drop-down menu in the application configuration page.

Regards,
Plum Support

[Bertrand]

Thanks - I did try and it does work indeed. I just need to familiarize myself with the interface and Save my application once it has been validated.

Back to the speak tag, if I want to write apps that work with any TTS selected, I should use it systematically?
It's not going to upset those TTS that do not need it?

Bertrand

[support]

Hi Bertrand,

About the <speak> tag, you can use it within your applications (regardless of the TTS engine), but it is marked as a redundant tag since the <prompt> tag already synthesizes the specified text.

To clarify on our earlier post, we only mentioned using the <speak> tag since you have to include it with an xml:lang attribute if using a different language when using the Realspeak TTS engine.

Regards,
Plum Support