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Testing speech synthesis

When you are developing a script for the phone channel and thinking out bot phrases, verifying the way they will sound after synthesis is highly recommended. This way, you will be able to assess in advance if the bot speech sounds natural — and if it doesn’t, you can improve the phrase text until the way it sounds is optimal.

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Synthesis testing is available on all plans except the free ones.

The Tovie Platform script editor provides a special widget which allows you to verify the way bot phrases are synthesized by the available TTS providers.

tip
If the provider supports speech synthesis markup using SSML, you can also use it in the widget.

How to launch the test widget​

The test widget is available from the code editor: open the necessary bot project and go to Editor → Code. There are several ways to launch the TTS test widget:

  • Click TTS in the top right corner of the editor.

  • Use the Ctrl + F10 (⌘ + F10) key combination.

  • Click in the editor gutter. This icon appears in all lines which contain the a tag.

    tip
    In this case, the synthesized text field will be prefilled with the answer from the a tag. Additionally, if the tag has a tts parameter, the value of this parameter will be used instead.

TTS provider configuration​

The widget allows you to configure the TTS provider and the voice which will be used for synthesizing the phrase. You can select among all providers which can be used when creating a phone channel.

Please note that the connection to any of these providers is granted by Tovie AI. Using them for speech synthesis counts towards the TTS usage limit allowed by your subscription plan.

If you have configured your own TTS connection, you can also use this connection in the widget. In this case, TTS usage limits do not apply to you.

Synthesized text limitations​

You can use the widget to synthesize texts whose length does not exceed 1,000 characters.