Configure TTS voices

Every Say Message node in your IVR — and the Customer-first greeting on each queue — uses text-to-speech to read the text you typed. The voice that speaks it is configured per language on the Voices tab.

Before you start

• A phone number provisioned with at least one IVR flow assigned.
• A decision on which languages your callers speak. Most channels need only one; multi-language operations need a voice per language.

Steps

1. Open Settings → Voice.
2. Select your phone number in the sidebar, then go to the Voices tab.
3. Pick the language you want to configure from the language picker.
4. Pick a voice from the catalog for that language. Each voice has a sample button — preview it before saving.
5. (Optional) Adjust speech rate and pitch if the catalog exposes those controls for the selected voice.
6. Repeat for each additional language you serve.
7. Save.

The IVR’s Say Message nodes and Customer-first greetings now speak in the chosen voice when the call’s language matches.

How the call’s language is decided

A call’s language is determined in this order:

1. If the IVR has a Language Selection node and the caller picked an option, the call’s language is set to that choice.
2. Otherwise, the call uses the channel’s default language as configured on the Voices tab.

You can read or set the call’s language mid-flow via a Set Variable step (using the call’s language variable) — useful when an API call earlier in the flow returned the caller’s preferred language.

Verify it worked

Dial your number and walk through an IVR step that includes a Say Message. The message should be spoken in the voice you configured for that language.

If the voice sounds wrong, double-check that the call’s language matches the language whose voice you edited — if you only configured an English voice but the call ran in French, you’ll hear a fallback.

Catalog notes

• The voice catalog covers 40+ languages.
• Each language typically has both male and female voice options.
• Some languages have neural voices that sound more natural; others only have standard voices. Preview before committing.
• The voice is fixed at the channel level — you can’t have different Say Message nodes in the same flow speak in different voices unless you switch the call’s language.

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: The voice sounds robotic and you remembered it sounding better in another tenant. Fix: The other tenant likely picked a neural voice. Check the Voice quality indicator next to each option in the dropdown and pick a Neural variant if available.

• Symptom: A Say Message reads numbers wrong (e.g. “twelve oh five” instead of “twelve-oh-five” for 12:05). Fix: TTS engines vary in how they interpret formatted numbers. Spell out tricky values in the Say Message text — “twelve oh five” reads more reliably than “12:05”.

• Symptom: You can’t pick a voice for a language you need. Fix: That language isn’t in the catalog. Use the closest related language as a workaround (for example, Brazilian Portuguese for European Portuguese), or upload a pre-recorded Play Audio node for that specific message.

See also

• Build an IVR flow
• Configure hold audio and queue greetings
• IVR node types