Josh•3d ago

Voiceflow Agent not pronouncing clients name correctly.

We have a Dr who’s plastic surgery practise we have built a complex Voiceflow agent for. However it does not pronounce his last name correctly. We have tried multiple ways to fix this, including spelling the name how it should sound, however our Agent proceeds to type this incorrect spelling in the chat. Please help!

1 Reply

Tico | Voiceflow Assistant•3d ago

Here are a few reliable ways to make your agent pronounce the doctor’s last-name properly without showing a weird spelling in chat: 1. Wrap the name with an SSML alias

<speak>
  Dr. <sub alias="MAR-zella">Marczella</sub> will see you now.
</speak>

<speak>
  Dr. <sub alias="MAR-zella">Marczella</sub> will see you now.
</speak>

• <sub alias="…"> tells the TTS engine what to say (alias) while keeping the real spelling for display and transcripts.
• Works in Telephony, Web-Chat, Prototype – Amazon Polly, Google, etc. 2. Or use the <phoneme> tag for full phonetics

<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="mɑɹˈzɛlə">Marczella</phoneme>

<phoneme alphabet="ipa" ph="mɑɹˈzɛlə">Marczella</phoneme>

This lets you enter IPA or x-sampa if you need very precise control. 3. Keep chat clean if SSML prints to the screen If your chat widget is showing the raw SSML, split the flow: • Voice path → Output step that contains the SSML.
• Chat path → Output step that contains the normal spelling. Route with a quick condition ({{platform}} == "voice" vs chat). 4. Last-resort: record the correct audio and play it with an Audio step. Any of the SSML options above will fix pronunciation but still display the doctor’s name correctly to your users.
More on SSML tags in Voiceflow: https://docs.voiceflow.com Let me know if that sorts it out! 😊

Voiceflow Agent not pronouncing clients name correctly.

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