The Elements Dashboard includes a wizard to help you configure Text-to-Speech (TTS) on your Voice Elements Platform. Here are step-by-step instructions for installing the Speech Engine and testing Text-to-Speech.
Installing the Speech Engine
1) Open up Elements Dashboard and “Launch Wizard” from the “Tools” menu:
2) Once the configuration wizard has loaded, navigate to the MS Speech tab. The wizard will determine whether or not the MS Speech components have been installed. If they have not, click the “Install” button to install them.
Note: If you would prefer to manually install the Microsoft Speech Platform components on your server (particularly if you will be using speech recognition and need to create custom grammar files) see the article Install Microsoft Speech Platform.
3) After the installation has of the Microsoft Speech Platform components has completed, select your desired default voice from the list:
Three voices are installed by default: “ZiraPro,” “Zira,” and “David.” If you would like to install additional voices, click the “Additional Voices/Languages” link; your default browser will open to a Voice Elements support article describing the process to download and install additional voices.
4) When you have completed the installation and configured your default TTS voice, click next to save all changes and restart the Voice Elements services. Select “Yes” when prompted.
With the Microsoft Speech Platform installed and configured to work with Voice Elements, it’s time to test it.
Download and Test Using the Speech Recognition Demo
1) Download the Speech Recognition sample application from the Voice Elements Customer Portal. Once logged in to the portal, access the samples from Settings -> Downloads. Download the executable version.
2) Extract the downloaded archive and open the resulting directory.
3) Configure the application to connect to your local server by editing the VoiceApp.exe.config file. Enter the appropriate information for PhoneServer, UserName, Password, and TestPhoneNumber, and save the file.
4) Run VoiceApp.exe; it will connect to your local Voice Elements server and register for calls to the phone number configured. When you call the number, you should be prompted to “Press or say 1, 2, 3, or 4.” When you speak one of these numbers, if recognized, the application will ask you to confirm the recognition by speaking yes or no. The application window will also show the response and a score denoting how confident it is in the recognition. If the application didn’t understand your response, it will prompt you again.
All of the prompts played by the demo are done via text-to-speech, using the default voice chosen in the setup wizard. You can always override the voice used on a play-by-play basis when calling the PlayTTS method; see Using Text-to-Speech Voices for more information.
Do you still have questions? If so, please contact Inventive Labs Technical Support.