Suggested change to <audio/>

Hey Folks,

One of the best features of audio is the ability to play backup tts
should the audio source be unavailable.  Currently though, <audio/>
requires either the src or expr attributes to be listed, or a badfetch
is tossed.  Well, I've come upon a scenario where I wouldn't
necessarily want to list either, and use the backup tts feature in a
way that wasn't anticipated, but could be very useful.

For example, let's say I'm playing an account number to the caller:
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'1.wav'">1</audio>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'2.wav'">2</audio>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'3.wav'">3</audio>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'4.wav'">4</audio>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'5.wav'">5</audio>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'6.wav'">6</audio>

I'm not going to prerecord every possible number, so I play audio one
digit at a time.  But, if for any reason one or more of them is
unavailable, I would rather the whole thing be read back as TTS.   The
above code sounds horrible as backup tts, and I do not really have
ssml control over it.

What I would like to see is this:

<audio>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'1.wav'/>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'2.wav'/>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'3.wav'/>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'4.wav'/>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'5.wav'/>
  <audio expr="AudioDirectory+'6.wav'/>
  <prosody rate="-10%">
  <say-as interpret-as="digits">123456</say-as>
  </prosody>
</audio>

This (or something similar) would allow you to chain a bunch of audio
prompts together, but if any of them fail, have a single backup tts
prompt replaced for all of them.  In my head, if all numbers wav files
were unavailable, or even if just 5.wav were unavailable, none of them
would play, and the ssml'ed TTS would play instead.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Shane Smith

Received on Thursday, 27 April 2006 16:37:39 UTC