asterisk users - Sep 2005 - Voice Prompts, what do you think? Good voice.

Repost, first one never made it to the list... 

-----Original Message-----
From: Gregory Wiktor - ADCom Corp. 
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2005 3:20 AM
To: 'Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion'
Subject: Voice Prompts, what do you think? Good voice. Should we record
a new prompt-set?

Hello all,
I have someone working for me who has a nice phone voice.  I looked at
some available prompts for asterisk, and found both the free and
commercial ones to be pretty horrible.  The asterisk ones are good, but
I wish I had more to choose from sometimes.

My question is, what do you think, should I bother having her record a
full spectrum of prompts for asterisk?

If you want to hear her voice, the ivr/bri number is 1-914-693-0821

If it is something the community would want, I can spend the time with
her, otherwise I am fine with the regular voices.

If you wanted any custom prompts done, we could do it.  She works for me
anyway so its not a big deal, but for anything extensive I should give
her some money to do it.

This is not a studio setup, but we have a good microphone setup and the
quality even on BRI sounds great. I just need to spend some time
adjusting the audio levels on my bri and in the wav files.

For me, this worked out well, since my own voice I admit sounds very
anal on the phone.

Feel free to call and listen, but the timeout goes to fax.

There is a good chance I will do it, but want some feedback. What would
be especially helpful at this point would be suggestions for new prompts
for asterisk.  This way if I spend like 2 hours doing it with her, at
least I can cover any new prompts that may come up.

I like the Allison prompts, but sometimes they sound too sexy.  April's
voice(my employee) is a bit flirty, but I think it works in a good way.

If I did it I would probably give away a basic prompt set, but charge
$50 or $100 for the extra stuff like pin codes and things that are not
normally used for a personal nature.

Regards,
Gregory Wiktor
gw@adcomcorp.com
Web: www.adcomcorp.com

Gregory,

My advice is to go for it. Allison is nice but there are times when her
accent doesn't pass the International test ( e.g. everyone I've ever
spoken
to in the UK roll about on the floor laughing when they first hear her in
the Voicemail prompt, telling you to leave a message ).

Others will probably disagree with me (in fact there was a discussion on
this very recently), but if you do go for it, I would personally like to see
the recordings in .wav format (8k, mono, PCM, 16 bit) - Wavelab allows this
to be done very easily. I save all my final prompts in this format because
they provide great sound quality compared to GSM, and also allow for high
quality sonic idents (something I'll be posting about soon. Watch this
space).

If people prefer them in different formats, they can then use the wavs as
the basis and re-encode them (e.g. gsm). But like I said, that's just my
opinion. I'm not saying this is what everybody wants, or what you should
definitely do.

Faris.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gregory Wiktor - ADCom Corp. 
> There is a good chance I will do it, but want some feedback.