Plum IVR Support

How can I read a text file in vxml.
Or is there any way to read a text block in a vxml. I tried to read the text block inside a <prompt> tag. That text block has some mail ids like <meena@iallways.com> ......Its failing.

Is the "<" and ">" creating the problem. If so should i have to replace it with < and >
What are the other char i should chk for and replace with.

Thanks,
Meena

Hi Meena:

can you explain what you mean by read a text file? Do you mean making the text spoken with text to speech, or do you mean read data from another location? please elaborate upon your IVR needs.

Actually I have a text block( string ).
I thought I can write the block into a text file and try to read it.Like how we read the .wav files. But, then I found that, its cannot be done that way. So, I just placed the string inside the <prompt> tags.
Thats were i got the problem. My text block was having some mail ids.

Thanks,
Meena

Hi Meena:

I think I understand what you are trying to do. When you are providing text to speech for the IVR to play, it's important that all of the characters that are introduced have contextual meaning. For example, the "@" character does not have any meaning in conversational speech, but it does have meaning within an acronym or an email address. a "$" character does not have a valid meaning within the context of an email address, but it is valid for some currencies.

The point is, make sure that the characters you are passing in are valid for a given type of information. The plum IVR will still play TTS for any printable characters, but it won't sound right unless you take contextual meaning into account. The <say-as> tag provides a convenient way to specify what type of context you are trying to present with regards to speech.

You can find more info regarding IVR tags in the official Plum IVR Programmers Reference manual, located here:

http://www.plumvoice.com/docs/dev/voicexml:tags

All supported IVR tags are listed under section 1.1: "Tag Descriptions".
Hope this helps! Reply if you need more assistance

kind regards,

Plum Support Staff

Thank you for the clarification.

Meena