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.