Text-to-speech (TTS) engines overview

Prerequisites

Note: The organization's default text-to-speech (TTS) engine is Genesys TTS. To access additional third-party TTS engines in Architect, first obtain them from the Genesys AppFoundry. Then, configure them in Genesys Cloud. For more information, see About text-to-speech (TTS) engines.

To meet your organization’s text-to-speech (TTS) needs, Genesys offers the following options:

  • Genesys provides an enhanced TTS engine that you can install from the Genesys AppFoundry. The Genesys Enhanced TTS engine offers many voice and language options and great audio quality. Genesys includes usage of the Enhanced TTS engine free of charge in Dialog Engine Bot Flows.
  • You can add third-party TTS engine integrations and then select voice and language options. These integrations expand language options and enable you to select a TTS voice for the organization, serving callers across built-in applications with the most appropriate voice. Architect can integrate with these third-party solutions for text-to-speech playback on a per-flow basis. 
  • Genesys Cloud also includes a default Genesys text-to-speech (TTS) engine that offers more limited voice and language options and is suitable for testing purposes.

For a specific flow, you can configure the TTS engine and voice options for each language you include in the flow. You can select any TTS voice that the configured TTS engine supports.

The TTS voice does not need to match the flow’s language. For example, you can use a language as your flow’s default language for which Architect supports speech recognition (“en-GB”), and at the same time, use a different TTS voice (“en-IE”) to meet your customers’ language needs.

Notes:
  • TTS voices that do not directly match the flow’s language can result in issues with the customers’ text-to-speech experience.
  • If your flow uses prompts, Architect plays the prompt’s audio recording based on the flow’s language. If you want to use a TTS voice for prompts, remove the audio recording and add text instead.
  • Because not all TTS engines operate the same way, Genesys and third-party TTS engine playback performance can vary depending on language, dialect, and voice. Perform testing to ensure you find the best solution for your use case, or contact your solutions consultant. For more information about third-party TTS engine performance, see Test your third-party TTS engine playback.
  • Only third-party TTS solutions are supported in the US East 2 (Ohio)/FedRAMP region. 
  • Only PCI-certified third-party solutions are available in Architect secure call flows. Secure call flows can only use the Genesys TTS engine, Genesys Enhanced TTS, Amazon Polly TTS, Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Text-to-Speech, or Nuance Text-to-Speech.
Warning: Use caution when deactivating a third-party TTS engine integration. Currently, an administrator can deactivate a third-party TTS engine in Genesys Cloud without a dependency check when the TTS engine is the default engine for the organization or selected in a flow.

If an administrator deactivates a third-party TTS engine chosen as the default TTS engine for the organization or any flows, the system defaults to the Genesys TTS engine for supported languages. If Genesys TTS does not support the language, then the text-to-speech string does not play at call flow runtime. For more information, see Search for flows that use a TTS engine.