<voice>

Description

Specifies voice characteristics for the spoken text.

Syntax

<voice
    gender="male" | "female" | "neutral"
    age="integer"
    variant="integer"
    name="name"
    category="child" | "teenager" | "adult" | "elder"> 
  child elements
</voice>

Attributes

Attribute	Description
gender	Preferred gender of the voice to speak the text.
age	Preferred age of the voice to speak the text.
variant	A variant of the other voice characteristics to speak the text.
name	Name of the specific voice name to speak the text.

Parents

Audio Emphasis Enumerate ForEach Paragraph Prompt Prosody Sentence Speak Voice

Children

Audio Break Emphasis Mark Paragraph Phoneme Prosody Say-as Sentence Sub Value Voice #PCDATA

Limitations/Restrictions

Refer to your vendor documentation for support details.

Note: If you are using a TTS engine that does not support <voice>, click here for a workaround.

Example

To include speech markup tags, insert the SSML tags inside one of the <prompt>, <audio>, <enumerate>, or <foreach> (within <prompt>) elements.

<prompt>
   <voice gender="female">I am a woman</voice>
   <!-- platform specific voice name -->
   <voice name="Jill">My name is Jill</voice>
</prompt>

Workaround for <voice>

If you are using a TTS engine that does not support <voice>, you can use the following workaround:

Instead of using the <voice> tag, use the TTSENGINE property or attribute of <prompt> to specify which TTS engine (ie. voice) you want to use and to switch between TTS engines (voices). For example:

<prompt>

   <value expr="greeting"/>

   This will use the default voice.

</prompt>

<prompt ttsengine="SPEECHIFY_TOM">

   This will use a male voice, if a male voice is configured as Speechify Tom.

</prompt>

<prompt ttsengine="SPEECHIFY_MARA">

   This will use a female voice, if a female voice is configured as Speechify Mara.

</prompt>

If you own a VoiceGenie platform, you can switch between any of the voices you have installed, using the TTSENGINE names you have configured for each voice.