About Text-to-Speech

Text-to-speech (also known as Speech Synthesis) is great for IVR systems that need to speak people's names, street addresses, and things that you cannot sensibly pre-record as prompts. It’s also useful if you use pre-recorded prompts that you expect to change regularly.

SQLphone uses SAPI (the Microsoft Speech standard) to carry out text-to-speech. SQLphone supports SAPI version 4 and version 5 standards.

To use text-to-speech in your IVR system, you need a Speech Engine. If you are running Windows 2000/XP/2003, you already have the Microsoft speech engine installed. Just select Text-to-speech from the SQLphone Connect menu, then select the Microsoft voice -- you are now ready to use text-to-speech in your IVR system.

Speech Engines

The free Microsoft speech engine is not high quality, and it speaks only US English.

You can buy high quality speech engines from the suppliers below. Most suppliers have online demos.

You can get further information, details of more suppliers, and reports comparing speech engines from TMA Associates

Windows 95/98/ME/NT

If you have an older version of Windows, you need to install SAPI before you can use text-to-speech in your IVR system. Click the links below to download SAPI and the free US English speech engine from Microsoft.