Imagine if you will, that it is three o’clock in the morning and you are sleeping peacefully—until your mobile phone rings. You fumble for a moment as you wake up enough to answer the call. Even though the CallerID says “Unknown”, it must be an important call as it is three o’clock in the morning, right?
Did I forget to mention that it is Saturday morning?
You say “Hello?” and are greeted by a robotic sounding woman’s voice that replies “Your Velocity Credit Union” ATM card has been de-activated because of fraud, Press ‘1’ to re-activate your card.” This was my recent experience.
I pressed ‘1’, in the hopes of reaching a real operator, who could [...]

In part I of this post we looked at the three most basic tones in English and we checked out the performance of the text-to-speech, or TTS, robot at AT&T Labs named “Mike”. We discovered that English does in fact have tones. And we discovered that tones are hard to get right in text-to-speech.
In this post we look at a different example of vocal inflection in English. And we see how tones interact with sentences. Listen to examples #1a and b, below.
Example #1a (falling then rising): “You downloaded the newest vèrsion, didn’t you?”
Example #1b (falling then falling again): “You downloaded the newest version, didn’t you?”
(The examples here follow the presentation of local meanings of rising [...]

Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) take many forms. Think school- and jobsite-closing messages broadcast simultaneously and automatically to many phones at once some morning when there’s bad weather and you get the idea.
When we at Jaduka collaborate with clients on a new CEBP improvement project, the question of text-to-speech, or TTS, frequently comes up. Not all CEBP improvement projects need TTS. But some can benefit from careful TTS somewhere. Our general advice is to be smart about TTS — make sure you need it and then use it sparingly. And we find that we sometimes have to go back over this point because executives tend to want TTS even when they don’t need it. Think Flash [...]