Most developers already know that, frankly, VoiceXML sucks. Fortunately, there is a viable alternative; the .NET (News - Alert) VoIP platform Voice Elements by Inventive Labs. This platform offers a wide range of functionality for developers, making their lives much easier, but occasionally, the platform does run into a hiccup or two. For example, depending on the text-to-speech vendor a company uses, there can occasionally be some compatibility issues. Fortunately, Inventive Labs recognizes these concerns and created a handy blog post to address them.
According to the post, the issues occur most often with TTS vendors that use SAPI (ie. NeoSpeech, Cepstral (News - Alert), Loquendo, etc.) The issue is not with Voice Elements itself, as test applications have shown that problems exist outside of the platform, but the issues seem to occur intermittently. There is also no predictable pattern to time of day or traffic factors that influence the errors, though heavy use of TTS can make the issues more prevalent.
Companies that are experiencing issues with TTS crashing Voice Elements should take a close look at when the issues are occurring. The issue is most likely with the TTS vendor, so Inventive Labs recommends several vendors that seem to hold up pretty well with the Voice Elements platform.
NeoSpeech is one recommended company, as it boasts good voice quality and better pronunciation than most TTS vendors. It also seems more compatible with Voice Elements. Another recommended vendor is Cepstral, which has similar pricing to NeoSpeech.
Finally, there are some workarounds that companies can implement. The first stop is backing up Voice Elements directories, thus ensuring that the most recent version of the platform is running. There is a zip file that can be accessed here, and a configuration code available here that will help. Run a quick test of the workaround and, most likely, everything will work out!
Edited by Allison Boccamazzo
›