Advanced Keypad Greetings

Updated 8 months ago by Justin Maxwell

Our text-to-speech engine handles standard sentence structure, and reads them in a friendly, somewhat robotic voice. For most users, the default is satisfactory. However, if you want to get under the hood, it also supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). Entering your greeting in SSML allows advanced features such as adjustable pause time. For example, you could put this as your greeting (copy and paste this and then edit):

<speak>
  Hi, you've reached Justin. I'm now going to pause for three seconds.
  <break time="3s"/>.
  Now I am going to pause for 200 milliseconds.
  <break time="200ms"/>.
</speak>

You can also do some very cool stuff with customizing pronunciation, speed, emphasis, and more.

​<speak>
    <prosody​ ​rate​=​"x-slow"​ ​pitch​=​"x-low"​>​Help me, I'm stuck in molasses.</prosody>​
    <p><s>It is <emphasis​ ​level​=​"strong"​>​very</emphasis> sticky.</s></p>
</speak>

For full documentation, see the friendly SSML Guide on Google Cloud or the "my brain hurts" full text of the SSML Specification at W3C.

Note: We do not guarantee technical support or how-to's for SSML, but we might help if you are very nice about it.

How did we do?