Standard spoken prompts come built in, and any of them can be replaced with your own recording.
Until now, the system spoke mostly in beeps. It now has a voice.
Standard prompts
Pidgin Talk comes with standard recordings for the things it has to say by itself: the voicemail instructions, "you have three new messages", the options for recording a greeting, "nobody is parked on that line".
They come from a well-known open collection of telephone prompts, used under its Creative Commons license, with the credit kept alongside the files.
Replace any of them
A Prompts page lists every prompt with the wording a recording should have and what plays if there is none. Upload your own recording for any of them. Some offices want every prompt in the same voice as their main greeting. Some want them in another language. Both are a matter of uploading files.
Remove your recording and the standard one comes back.
Three levels
For each prompt the system plays the first of these it finds:
- your own recording,
- the standard recording,
- a tone.
So nothing ever breaks for want of a file. The worst case is a beep where a sentence would be.
Counting out loud
"You have three new messages" is assembled from parts: the opening, the number, the ending. It is spoken only when all three parts are present, for counts up to twenty. Otherwise the system goes straight to the messages.
They travel with the system
The standard recordings are copied into the same storage folder as everything else an office uploads. Moving a system to a new server means taking one folder, and the voice comes with it.