How to control speech

This doc covers how you can control and direct how the speech generated by the agent.

You have selected voice of your agent, but there’s more to how your agent speaks you might want to customize, like how to pronounce certain words, where to pause, etc.

How to let the agent read something slowly

Although you can adjust general speed of the audio by changing the voice speed, you might want to slow down the agent’s speech only at certain points (e.g. when the agent is saying a phone number). You can do this by adding a hyphen in the instructions/begin message. Do this: add a - in between the text/numbers

Note: the space around - is important. So format it like this: 2 - 1 - 3 - 4

Note that this feature requires that what the agent says, will contain a hyphen. You can do this two ways:

1. If you want the agent to say something in the begin message, you can simply add it to the begin message, because the agent will say that literally.

2. If you wan the agent to say for example a phone number slowly in the conversation itself, you should add it to the instructions. Say something like this: "When you are pronouncing a phone number, say it like 4 - 1 - 5 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 instead of 415222123".

Pronunciation

This feature only works when the language is set to English

You can also control how certain words are pronounced. This is useful when you want to make sure certain uncommon words are pronounced correctly.

To use the feature, click the purple text 'pronunciation guide'.

Then, a popup shows (see picture below). You need to add:

• the word to be pronounced. For example, actually

• the phonetic pronunciation of the word using the IPA alphabet. For example, æktʃuəli

You can search online to find the phonetic pronunciation of a word, or use the IPA pronuncing dictionary tool to get the right phonetic spelling.