Sometimes it is hard to understand automatically generated alert messages when they are transmitted in a voice call. This is especially the case in noisy environments. Therefore it might be a good idea to send the alert message as push, email or SMS as well. In this case the user gets a voice call (which works very well to wake somebody up for example) and then he or she can read the alert message as text on his or her phone.

However, there are some tricks to make it easier to grasps alert messages in voice calls. For example you should assemble alert texts that are good to understand after being processed by the text-to-speech (TTS) engine. Those texts should contain clear descriptive words rather than a lot of codes, numbers or technical abbreviation.

When it comes to numbers (e.g. phone numbers like “5551234567”) some TTS engines read this as “five five five one ….” but others read it as “five billion, five hundred and fifty-one million ….”. The latter is hard to recognize of course.

In Enterprise Alert you can force the TTS engine to read the number digit by digit. Depending on what you use for making voice calls, you will have to edit file “DefaultMapping.xml” in either of the below two directories:

“C:\…\Enterprise Alert\VoIPModule”
“C:\…\Enterprise Alert\OCSModule”

Your default file should look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<mm_mapping>
<word>
<original>ID</original>
<replacement>I D</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>SMS</original>
<replacement>S M S</replacement>
</word>
</mm_mapping>

As you can see Enterprise Alert can enforce reading single letters by adding a whites paces to certain pre-configured strings. Before we go any further please make sure you always have a backup of these files available, just in case. Below you will find an already adapted XML which you can copy and use in your environment.
<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<mm_mapping>
<word>
<original>ID</original>
<replacement>I D</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>SMS</original>
<replacement>S M S</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>0</original>
<replacement>0-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>1</original>
<replacement>1-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>2</original>
<replacement>2-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>3</original>
<replacement>3-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>4</original>
<replacement>4-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>5</original>
<replacement>5-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>6</original>
<replacement>6-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>7</original>
<replacement>7-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>8</original>
<replacement>8-</replacement>
</word>
<word>
<original>9</original>
<replacement>9-</replacement>
</word>
</mm_mapping>

The above change maps single digits like “1” to “1-“, “2” to “2-“, etc. Whenever there is a phone number in an alert text now Enterprise Alert will not read “5551234567” anymore but “5-5-5-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-” and as an effect it reads digit by digit “five five five ….”.
Once you have copied them to your environment save the file you edited and start the service you use for Voice communication.
Either “Enterprise Alert® VoIP Module” when connection to VoIP servers like Cisco, Avaya or Siemens HiCom or “Enterprise Alert® Lync and OCS Module” when using Lync / Skype for Business.
Now Enterprise Alert will read numbers digit by digit.

You can also use this trick to omit special characters. For example if your alert text is “## Error ## Server1234 ##” it might be the TTS engine literally ready the word “hash tag” for every “#” sign. In this case you can just replace it by a space character:

<word>
<original>#</original>
<replacement> </replacement>
</word>

This way you can fine-tune message text to be read on the phone and make sure your users will understand the message.