Newsletter 
Tips and Tricks of the Pros
If you're familiar with Site Builder, you know that there are often several ways to accomplish a given task. In 'Voice Site Originals', we will share best practices learned over the course of creating several hundred Voice Sites which will improve the efficiency of your applications.
Date & Time
In every Voice Site that I create, I set the 'Home Page' to be a Logic Page that I call 'Initialize Variables'. In this Logic Page, I use a substring of the 'CurrentTime' System Variable to set both a 'Date' and a 'Time' Site Variable, like this:
So Date will then contain 'mm/dd/yyyy', and Time will contain 'hh:mm:ss'.
If you then log Date and Time separately into a Data File, you can then create reports that do analysis on Date and Time directly. You can also use the 'CallStartTime' System Variable instead of 'CurrentTime' if that would be more appropriate for the application.
Generating a Unique ID
Transactional applications often require a unique ID to be generated and stored along with the call record. You can use a combination of System Variables in a Logic Page to create such a unique ID. Here is an example that uses the Date and Time variables created in the example above to form a unique ID of the following format:
mmddyyyyhhmmss<CallerID>
where:
mm = month
dd = day
yyyy = year
hh = hour
mm = minute
ss = second
<CallerID> = CallerID System Variable
The Logic Page uses the 'remove' operator to extract the slash and the colon from the Date and Time variables, respectively.
In the next release of Angel.com, there will be a new System Variable called 'CallGUID', short for 'Call Globally Unique ID', which will be a unique ID for the call.
Rapid Prompt Recording
I often find that I need to have several prompts recorded in a batch by someone who is not necessarily familiar with Angel.com. While a Voice Site does provide a System Command specifically for recording audio content to a Voice Site, there are cases where you do not want to use this System Command. For instance, you may not want to give your Angel.com PIN to the person recording your prompts (which is required to use the 'Record' command), but you still want them to be able to record the prompts over the phone.
I often find that I need to have several prompts recorded in a batch by someone who is not necessarily familiar with Angel.com. While a Voice Site does provide a System Command specifically for recording audio content to a Voice Site, there are cases where you do not want to use this System Command. For instance, you may not want to give your Angel.com PIN to the person recording your prompts (which is required to use the 'Record' command), but you still want them to be able to record the prompts over the phone.
You can then give your voice talent the phone number to the Voice Site, and simply ask them to follow the instruction to record the prompts. The 'Press 1 When Ready' page instructs the voice talent to press 1 when they're ready to record (using the phonetic spelling of "reecord" so the tts pronounces it correctly):
The 'Record the Prompt after the Beep', as the name implies, instructs the voice talent to record the prompt:
And then takes the voice talent right back to the beginning to record another prompt (or re-record the one they just recorded). The voice talent can record many prompts very quickly.
You then end up with the sound files in your 'Mailbox', and you can then:
- Download the sound files to your computer and name them appropriately.
- Convert the downloaded sound files to 16 bit, 8 khz, mono, Windows PCM .wav.
- Upload the converted sound files to the target Voice Pages. To upload several sound files at once, you can upload a .zip file containing multiple .wav files.
1. Download the sound files.
2. Convert the downloaded sound files to 16 bit, 8 khz, mono, Windows PCM .wav (using Windows Recorder, for example).
3. Upload each of the converted sound files (or upload multiple sound files at once by uploading a single .zip file).
To find out how to incorporate best practices like this into your Angel.com Voice Site, contact Steve Brown, VP, Angel.com Client Services, brown@angel.com.
