Howto:Localize Voice Mail Messages

Applies To

This information applies to innovaphone Voice Mail

More Information

Partners may want to have further foreign language prompts incorporated into innovaphone's voice mail product. Here is how to help with such translations.

Prerequisites

All voice prompts are created using a text-to-speech (TTS) engine. So the first pre-requisite is that the engine we use must support the target language. Also of course, there must be sufficient demand. Finally, the partner needs to be prepared to translate a number of text messages to the target language as well as keep them up-to-date with new voice mail releases over time.

Procedure

If you are interested in assisting with a translation, you need to open a presales case and indicate your interest. Please clearly indicate the desired target language and your wilingness and ability to translate German or English texts to the target language. Also please specify if you prefer to use German or English phrases as a base.

We will then check if our TTS supports your target language. If so, you will be provided with a file containing the then-current set of messages. This will be a zip file with a number of .txt files, each of them containing a single phrase.

You would then return the translated phrases to us and we will incorporate those into a subsequent VM release eventually.

Sample Phrase File

en_menu_voicebox_greetings_personal.txt:

To record a new, personal announcement, press 1. 
To listen to the current, personal announcement, press 2. 
To delete the current, personal announcement, press 3. 
To return to the main menue, press star.

More Considerations

Apart from translating all the phrases, we need some more information about the nature of the target language:

• Does one need ordinal numbers in order to pronounce dates in the target language?

A day/month example: 01.10. Is it pronounced like One October .. Thirtyone October or rather like First October .. Thirtyfirst October, i.e. with ordinal numbers (1st..31st)?

• How would the following daytimes be pronounced in the target language?
  Examples in en, de, dk:
  • English: 08:00 = "eight am", 08:04 = "eight o four am", 08:09 = "eight o nine am", 13:22 = "one twentytwo pm"
  • German: 08:00 = "acht uhr", 08:04 = "acht uhr vier", 08:09 = "acht uhr neun", 13:22 = "Dreizehn uhr zweiundzwanzig"
  • Danish: 08:00 = "klokken otte, nul, nul", 08:04 = "klokken otte, nul, fire", 08:09 = "klokken otte, nul, ni", 13:22 = "klokken tretten, to og tyve"

• When pronouncing the daytime, is there something in the target language alike "uhr" in German or "klokken" in Danish?

Voice Samples

We’re using Acapela TTS. If you want to rehearse how your prompts will sound alike, you can use the demo site.

If your target language is not supported by Acapela TTS you might consider human-generated prompts. The following article discusses the various pitfalls a beginner is likely to trap into:

• Howto:Creating fine announcements and music on hold

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