TTS playback of "From" or sender field

[admin_2]

While listening to e-mails via TTS, the sender or "From" field is NOT played back, only the Subject and the Body of the e-mail message are played back. What prevents Unity from reading back the "sender's" Info. (when the message comes from an external user, not a Unity subscriber)? Is this capability in road map, if so what is the time frame? If not, technically why this is not possible?<br>Thanks<br><br>

[#2]

This was not done in the current release which uses the L&H 3000 TTS engine, frankly, because it sounded like garbage when you passed it in an email address. Some TTS engines have special parsing engines that handle such addresses, 3000 is not one of them. When it goes to play, say, “Jsmith@aol.com” it tries to “sound it out” and it sounds like “Juhsmith AT awl period com”. It can get interesting trying to figure out who this person really is. Forcing it to “spell out” the name would work but is awfully tedious with long email addresses. In short the usability feedback was very poor.

We’ve expanded the TTS functionality to include new engines (i.e. the Real Speak engine will be available in 2.4.5) that handle this much better in their parsing engines. It wouldn’t be that much work to offer a configurable option to attempt to play the sender email address I wouldn’t think. We’d definitely want to be able to turn it off, though…

I suggest you ping the “Features@activevoice.com” mailbox and let the marketing guys know this is something you’d like to see on the list. It’s not currently on the development plate that I know of.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect
Active Voice
jlindborg@activevoice.com
http://members.home.net/jlindborg