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TTS Addresses

Questions and answers about IVR programming for Plum DEV

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michael
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2018 11:03 am

TTS Addresses

Post by michael »

Is there any documentation on using the <say-as type="address"> tag?

I'm having issues where if I capitalize part of the address it will read it literally.

For example "111 elm st" reads correctly.But "111 ELM ST" or "111 Elm St" reads 'S' 'T' instead of street?

Is there a convention on capitalization, punctuation, etc. when using the say as tag for addresses?

Also, I can't seem to get city names with St. in them said properly.

Examples. St. Paul, St Louis.

Thanks!

support
Posts: 3632
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2003 3:47 pm
Location: Boston, MA
Contact:

Re: TTS Addresses

Post by support »

Hi Michael,

Before we can look into it we will need to know which TTS engine you are using. Can you please reply with that information?

Regards,
Plum Support

michael
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jul 13, 2018 11:03 am

Re: TTS Addresses

Post by michael »

I'm using ATT's Natural Voices.

It seems converting street names to lowercase and having commas between steet name, city, state will cause it to read 'st' as 'street'.

support
Posts: 3632
Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2003 3:47 pm
Location: Boston, MA
Contact:

Re: TTS Addresses

Post by support »

Hi,

Unfortunately, with most text-to-speech engines there is not a lot of underlying documentation to reference that provides clear instruction on how it will interpret address details. The say-as tag is meant to provide a hint to the engine on how it should interpret the data but it does not guarantee things will be read correctly. For example, this is the entirety of the documentation provided by AT&T for addresses:

Code: Select all

The Address context tells the TTS engine to treat the text as an address. 
Syntax:
  <say-as type=”address”> text </say-as>

Languages:
  US English, UK English, Spanish, German, French

Example: 
  <say-as type=”address”>
    123 Main St.
    New York, NY 10017
  </say-as>

This is pronounced “one twenty three main street, New York, New York one zero 
zero one seven”
Your best bet is to do some experimentation to determine what will work best for abbreviations. Alternatively you could write some code to convert the most common address abbreviations into the full words as you expect them to be read either on the server-side or in your VoiceXML as javascript.

Regards,
Plum Support

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