How to use a TTS entry in a campaign audio field

Once you have built a text-to-speech entry, the last step is telling a campaign to actually play it. VICIdial does not give you a separate dropdown for this. Instead, you type a small reference into the same audio field you would otherwise point at a recorded file. Here is exactly how that works.

Add the TTS entry first

Before wiring anything to a Campaign, create the prompt. In the Admin section open the Text To Speech page and click Add A New TTS Entry. Fill out the fields, give it a memorable id, and write your TTS Text. That id is the hook you will reference later, so pick something you will recognize.

The TTS Text can pull from lead data and use any VICIdial Script variable, so a single TTS (text to speech) entry can serve every contact in a list while still personalizing each call.

Point a campaign prompt at it

Go to the campaign modification page and open the Survey link at the top. On that page, any audio file can be replaced with a TTS entry. To do it, type the letters TTS immediately followed by your entry id into the audio file field. There is no space and no separate setting to flip.

For example, if you named your entry simple_tts_entry, you would put this into the audio file field:

TTSsimple_tts_entry

VICIdial sees the TTS prefix, looks up the rest as an entry id, and plays the rendered speech where a recorded file would have gone.

What you can replace

The audio fields on the Survey page are all fair game. That gives you a few options for where speech makes sense:

• A welcome or intro prompt that reads back the contact's name
• A confirmation message that speaks an account or reference number
• Any prompt where the wording depends on data in the Lead record

How the lookup resolves

At call time the dialer reads the audio field, recognizes the TTS prefix, fetches the matching entry, renders it through the speech engine, and hands the audio to the Asterisk Dialplan to play.

flowchart TD
  A["Survey audio field"] --> B{"Value starts with TTS?"}
  B -->|No| C["Play recorded file"]
  B -->|Yes| D["Strip TTS prefix"]
  D --> E["Look up entry id"]
  E --> F["Render speech"]
  F --> G["Play to caller"]

Next steps

This same field reference works whether your entry is pure speech or a mix of recorded files and TTS. To build a blended prompt, see how to mix TTS with recorded audio. Recorded files referenced from a TTS entry come out of your audio store, explained in the audio store overview, and the broader audio prompts and TTS guide pulls it all together.

TTS prompts work in surveys, an IVR (interactive voice response), or a simple Call menu front end. If you want a dialer where the speech engine and audio store are already configured for you, see our plans and pricing.