If you live in any other country then USA or GB the automagic voice prompts that gets played in the response groups are not really that great, I mean it sounds ok in English but when you play it in Swedish for a customer they laughs (yes of course I choose Swedish) and I have been running them for a while on my business number and well it was time to change to some real voices.
So I played around a bit with my own voice, trying to record the voice prompts but you know when you listen to your own voice recorded it always sound a bit funny I so I was never happy. And the time I started to force myself into happiness there was that bird fight in the background.
Well time to hire the wife’s voice and well the buss came and it happilly informed the recording of the name of the buss stop and the ice-cream truck.
And how could I change this later without bugging her all the time if I need to change something?
After a minute of searching I found acapela-box which is a great text to speech web service.
And the best thing, it sounds GREAT!!!! well maybe that’s why they service all the larger automated phone services in Sweden so the voice is familiar to everyone calling. Great I want this…d
Just sign up, type in the text and press play. You can demo it and play around with it for free and it gets really hilarious when you write something in Swedish and then hit play in finish or Danish. It sure brings back memories of the first time with Exchange UM, trying out all that fun things you wrote in the first email you sent to Exchange UM back in the days. NSFW to write it here though….
The only bad thing now is that I cant pay to download, their stupid pay service wont accept verified by MasterCard or Visa card that my bank uses!!!
But you could try it out.
So how do I get it into Lync?
First, just create the voice prompt you want in acapela, and download it.
Supported Wave File Formats in Lync
All wave files must meet the following requirements:
- 8-bit or 16-bit file
- Linear pulse code modulation (LPCM), A-Law, or mu-Law format
- Mono or stereo
- 4MB or less
For the best performance of wave files, a 16 kHz, mono, 16-bit Wave file is recommended.
Supported Windows Media Audio File Formats
If you use a Windows Media audio file, consider using low bitrates, and verify the performance of your system under load. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398649.aspx
Then edit your Response Groups
When you are in the response group settings just choose “Select a recording” and that’s it.
Try it out… and this doesn’t have to stop in response groups, there are somethings to change in Exchange UM as well.
And Microsoft, cant you just buy them and put this in a cumulative update please so I don’t have to figgle around with creditcards and shit….
Edit: Some tips
My payment just went through out of magic and I could play a little.
So when you download a file, do it in MP3 and then convert into 16 bit wave file, if you just download the 22khz file Lync will not play it and it needs to be converted into the right format.
I use http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ for this and its free and simple.