Now admins can upload custom prompts and greetings, and Google will immediately offer playback and automatic transcriptions so that users can track and manage uploads. The new feature adds another option to Google’s existing text-to-speech service when setting up a Google Voice automated attendant. SEE: Android 12: New feature allows you to control the UI with face gestures via phone’s camera Google’s text-to-speech service offers customers over 100 synthesised voices, extending Alphabet’s DeepMind AI research in the field – including DeepMind’s WaveNet neural network for generating human-like speech – into commerce through Google’s cloud neural networks. Google Voice is one of the Google services that businesses can add to a Workspace account, from about $16 per user a month. The Custom Voice feature lets admins use a custom voice to synthesise audio using Google’s Cloud Text-to-Speech API. In the Custom Voice beta, Google noted that greetings will sound “as similar to your supplied audio data as possible”, but warned that it takes “several weeks to train and evaluate” a custom voice model. The automated Google Voice attendant works as you’d expect when calling a business, by playing messages and letting callers navigate options by pressing phone keys. Such bots can be acceptably efficient, while also handling initial questions that a caller might have. SEE: The best Samsung phones: Which model should you buy? The new custom message feature is available to all Google Workspace and G Suite customers with Google Voice standard and premier licenses. It doesn’t impact end users within an organisation, but it could help sales teams become more responsive to new trends in to groups of calls that can be categorized and responded to with a separate message.
