Exotel now supports all the SSML tags that are supported by Google TTS. Any applet that offers a Text To Speech service, like the Greeting Applet, IVR Applet, Gather Applet, etc. now supports SSML Tags. Campaign users can also now use this feature to power their static/dynamic campaigns!


Pre-requisites


  1. Raise a request to hello@exotel.com/ your account manager to enable language support for TTS.

  2. Ensure that “Tamil” is selected as the language when using SSML tags. (please use the <voice language> or <voice name>  SSML tag to change the language to the desired one)

  3. Ensure ASCII quotes [ " or ' ] are used wherever necessary in the SSML tags and not curly quotes [ “ or ’ ]

    NOTE:- The special character & is not supported by Google TTS.


Customers can now use the whole range of customizations offered by Google TTS by wrapping their text around the relevant SSML tags and ensuring an elevated User Experience is delivered to their end-customers.


To showcase some of the capabilities that are now available with this new launch, please refer to the following examples:


  1. Options to change Language, Gender and Accents:-

    1. With the “voice name” SSML tag, customers can choose from ~427+ different options that are offered via the Google TTS service.

    2. This includes 49 different languages from across the globe

    3. This also includes all the standard and premium voices as well: Standard, WaveNet, Neural2, Studio. Please note that the pricing for voices apart from Standard are significantly different.

Sample SSML wrapped text to use this feature:-


<speak><voice name="en-IN-Wavenet-D">Your Text</voice></speak>



<speak><voice language="en-IN">Your Text</voice></speak>


Please refer to the list of all the Voice Names and Voice Languages that are available here:-

https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/voices


  1. Options to change the speed at which the text is read out:-

    1. There are multiple ways of reducing the speed/rate at which your text is read out to your end-customers. PFB a samples to achieve the same:-

<speak><prosody rate ="90%">Your Text</prosody></speak>

    To learn more about the prosody element, see the W3 specification. You can also refer to this section of the google tts documentation to understand the prosody element. 


  1. Options to add a break of a few seconds between sentences. 


<speak>Your text<break time="2s"/>Your text here as well </speak>


This article doesn’t even scratch the surface of the level of customization that you can do with the power of SSML built into Exotel’s platform.