Basic Questions

[infowire]

Hi!

 

We want to establish a telephone service which is technically fairly similar to the Customer Enquiry Example from VoiceGuide. The caller can enter his postal code and in an Access database all entries with this or the closest postal code shall be played to him. That all!

 

Questions:

 

- We have only basic SQL-Knowledge. So how can we find the closest postal code if there does not exist an entry with the exact postal code that is entered by the caller?

- What about Text2Speech? We need a German solution. How does it work? We heard about AT&T Natural Voices and are really pleased by the great demonstrations we saw at http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/ Does it work with VoiceGuide and how is it done?

- A second solution is to make a wav-file for every entry in the database with the information that is to read to the caller. How could we implement that in VoiceGuide?

- Do we need VoiceGuide Enterprise for Text2Speech with AT&T Natural Voices?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Sebastian & Julian

[SupportTeam]

So how can we find the closest postal code if there does not exist an entry with the exact postal code that is entered by the caller?

How many digits in the postal code?

Easiest options that I can see is to set up an MS Excel file with one column listing all the post codes you have defined in ascending order - then its quite easy to use a VB Script to just run through them until you find one that matches or until a larger one is found - and return the either the matching one or the 'previous' or the 'next' postcode to the callflow.

We can write this VB script for you for our minimum charge of US$200.

What about Text2Speech? We need a German solution. How does it work? We heard about AT&T Natural Voices and are really pleased by the great demonstrations we saw at http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/ Does it work with VoiceGuide and how is it done?

We have other customers using AT&T Natural Voices with VoiceGuide and they say it works great for them - you just install the SAPI version of the Natural Voices TTS engine and that's is - it then gets used by VoiceGuide.

See end of thread: http://katalinatech.com/forums/index.php?a...act=ST&f=2&t=18

A second solution is to make a wav-file for every entry in the database with the information that is to read to the caller. How could we implement that in VoiceGuide?

Easy - just make the WAV filenames contain the Postcode number which was selected as the one matching or closest to user's entry, eg: Info_12345.wav where 12345 is the postcode, and you can specify which one should be played by defining the name using a 'Result Variable' which gets set by the VB script, eg:

Info_$RV[ClosestPostcode].wav

The same applies for a text file which you may want to be TTS playes out - in the "Sound file" text box just specify Info_$RV[ClosestPostcode].txt and the contents of the text pile wil be TTS'ed out.

Do we need VoiceGuide Enterprise for Text2Speech with AT&T Natural Voices?

Yes. Enterprise version allows you to use TTS.

 

I've answered the questions very quickly - so if you need clarification on any points please let us know and I'll expand on them.