Daniel Swarbrick wrote:

>Steve Underwood wrote:
>  
>
>>Esben Stien wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I think we should drop using humans for this and focus on using speech
>>>synthesis.
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Great. So where can we download this free speech synthesizer giving good 
>>quality in a wide variety of languages?
>>
>>    
>>
>
>I think we should focus more on clearly documenting the transcripts of 
>all the voice prompts (which I have already personally done, and correct 
>grammar in some cases), weeding out obsolete/unused prompts, and 
>cleaning up the multilingual aspects of OpenPBX, so that people can more 
>easily record their own prompts.
>
>My company hired a local TV journalist, who had experience doing 
>voiceovers, and recorded all the prompts ourselves, in addition to 
>custom IVR menu prompts.
>
>In my opinion, the naming of the individual prompts is haphazard, and 
>the structure of the directory containing prompts could be better 
>designed too. I think there has already been some discussion about a 
>system such as en_US, en_NZ, de_DE, de_CH, fr_CH etc, so that the system 
>can gracefully degrade to another version of the same language if the 
>localised dialect/accent is not available. In addition, nominate a 
>language to be used as a last-resort language, eg. if a channel is using 
>de_DE, but a required prompt doesn't exist in any de_* locale, then use 
>the en_US prompt.
>
>AFAIK, at the moment OpenPBX only has a concept of a language such as 
>EN, DE, FR etc, not a full locale code like en_US
>  
>
As well as a last resort fallback, some intermediate steps are highly 
desirable. For example, falling back from Latin Spanish, through 
Castillian Spanish to English as a last resort makes a lot more sense 
than falling back straight from Latin Spanish to English. Using locale 
type names is an improvement on the current scheme, but I am not sure 
how far it could be used. Those locales are based on written language 
requirements, which don't always map well to spoken languages. It would 
appear to make sense to fall back from de_CH, to de_<anything available> 
before falling back to some dialect of English. However, if you try that 
with Chinese you might be falling back from Mandarin to Cantonese, which 
are about as much alike as French and English (same ancient roots, but 
massive current day differences). I'm not sure if that is a serious 
deficiency or not, but it is something to consider.

Regards,
Steve

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