Troubleshooting Guide

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Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Servicing and Troubleshooting Guide, Release 7.0(1)
Chapter 8 Troubleshooting Tips
Text-to-Speech Problems
Non-UTF-8 characters needed for some languages
Symptom When using TTS for some languages, such as French or Spanish, characters are needed that
are not in the UTF-8 character set. For example: ç,é or ñ if not handled correctly, will cause the TTS
server to generate an error message, and the prompt will not be heard.
Error Message None.
Possible Cause By default, most TTS engines expect to receive characters only in the UTF-8 character
set, which are generally only those characters that are in the ASCII character set. Some characters in
languages like French or Spanish do not belong to that set, such as ç,é or ñ. When such characters are
required the script writer must specify the appropriate encoding explicitly. For most languages, use the
ISO-8859-1 encoding, unless otherwise specified. TTS vendors document the different ISO encoding
required by their TTS engines for different languages.
Recommended Action In order to specify such encoding, you must use SSML markup; therefore, you
cannot use plain text. The following example shows how character coding can be specified:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<speak>
Buonas tardes. Le estoy hablando en español.
</speak>
This can be provided in a file or can be specified in a TTS text expression in a Workflow step. When
using the Expression Editor in the Workflow Editor, certain characters must be "escaped" in order to be
evaluated properly. Enter the same text as follows when specified explicitly in a text expression for TTS:
u"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>
<speak>
Buonas tardes. Le estoy hablando en español.
</speak>
Recommended Action Note the use of the u"<text string>" syntax. That allows the use of the "\" escape
character within the string to escape the quote (") characters. You do not need to escape the non-UTF-8
characters such as theñ.
A .wav file prompt playback is garbled when played by a TTS server
Symptom A .wav file prompt playback is garbled when played out by a TTS server.
Note Prompts specified in VXML scripts or prompts created using the workflow CreateTTSPromptStep are
played out using TTS. Such prompts can mix text with audio files. Cisco Unified CCX supports wave
file formats with RIFF headers. For details on where prompts are played out, see the Cisco Unified CCX
Administration Guide.
Error Message None.
Possible Cause Nuance TTS may be configured as the system default TTS provider, in which case, the
wave file prompt is played out by Nuance TTS. Nuance TTS does not support RIFF header wave files.
Recommended Action Translate the RIFF header wave file into a Sphere header wave file using the utility
provided by Nuance. The utility can be found under the Nuance installation folder:
<$Nuance>V8.5.0\bin\win32\wavconvert.exe