🛠️ How-to guide

<aside> 🗣️

WHAT IT DOES

Choose how your agent sounds on the phone. Pick a voice for each language it speaks, hear it read a sample line before you save, and try changes on your test number before any caller hears them.

</aside>

Before you start

Set up a phone number first — see Voice & IVR.

Your voice settings are shared by all of the agent's voice channels, so a change here applies to a Zammo-managed number and your own Twilio number alike.

Where to find it

  1. Open your agent — for example Riverton 311 — and go to the Channels tab.
  2. Find the Voice / IVR row and choose Customize.

The Voice page for the Riverton 311 agent: the Test content and Live content stages, the language picker with English (United States) marked as set up, and a multilingual voice chosen for it.

The Voice page for the Riverton 311 agent: the Test content and Live content stages, the language picker with English (United States) marked as set up, and a multilingual voice chosen for it.

How it works

  1. Pick the stage you're editing. Test content is the voice used by the call simulator and your test number. Live content is the voice real callers hear; saved changes apply from the next call.
  2. Pick the language. Every language Microsoft offers a voice for is listed, and the ones your agent is set up to speak are marked set up. A call picks its voice from the caller's language, so each language gets its own — for example one voice for English (United States) and another for Spanish (United States).
  3. Pick the voice. Choose any voice for that language. If your agent answers in more than one language, turn on Only voices that can switch language and pick from those — a single-language voice reads other languages with the wrong accent. The page tells you which languages a voice also speaks.
  4. Hear it first. In Preview, type the line you want to hear, or use the sample provided, and choose Play. Select part of the text to preview just that fragment. With a voice that switches language, Preview in lets you hear it in each language it speaks.

The Preview panel with a greeting typed in, ready to play. Preview in lets you hear a language-switching voice in each language it speaks.

The Preview panel with a greeting typed in, ready to play. Preview in lets you hear a language-switching voice in each language it speaks.

  1. Save. Riverton 311 now greets callers in the voice you chose. To go back to the standard voice, choose Reset voice.

Keeping test and live in step

Because the two stages are separate, a voice you perfected on your test number is not yet what callers hear. When the two differ, the page says so and shows what's different, with a one-click Copy test settings to live (or the reverse) so you don't have to redo the work.

Advanced: write the speech script yourself

Switch How the voice is set to Advanced (SSML) to control speaking style, rate, pitch, and volume directly. SSML is a standard markup language for speech, and the voice is named inside your template rather than picked from the list.