For a long time, I have been disappointed with the voicemail greeting options available from most cellphone carriers. I have disliked leaving a pre-recorded message using my own voice and have hated the simple automated greetings that most carriers have to offer. If you are like me, then you’d rather have an impartial automated greeting that greets callers with whatever message you want them to hear. Thankfully, AT&T has been working on a text-to-speech utility with telephone responses in mind. What they have come up with is an utility that offers a range of synthesized speech voices that sound quite natural. Other companies such as Apple have had such a text-to-speech utility but none have come quite close to replicating natural speech as AT&T Labs has. You can check out more info regarding AT&T’s TTS utility and a demo for creating your own automated greeting or message here. You can also check out the custom greeting I created using their utility below. I found that the “Audrey: UK English” voice sounds the most natural (which I used to create my personalized iPhone greeting). Also, if you are using the AT&T TTS utility to record a custom greeting for your iPhone, use the record greeting option available on the Apple iPhone (pictured above), instead of using the dial-in option where you have to press different keys to access and configure your various voicemail options. Greetings recorded using the built-in iPhone utility are recorded at a higher quality than when using the dial-in option. When I used the dial-in option, my greeting had a bunch of static and ambient noise that made it hard to hear the actual greeting. With the iPhone utility, my custom greeting sounds crystal clear.
TTS Sample: iphone_greeting
Link: AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech
