Tips on handling sound files with your Angel.com account:

1. Because you can have “extra” phone numbers in your account for only a minimal charge, put one of them to regular use with your own staff:

• running a development copy of your voice site before you release the changes to the public on your main number(s)
• having a place to test changes
• playing with and learning more features of SiteBuilder!

2. Test new and old phrase recordings yourself, over the phone; not only on your computer. Put them into a simple greeting page or question page on a test site, in your own Angel account, and listen through them all for tone and pacing. Be sure your phrases make the intended effect and are intelligible over a variety of phones and situations:

• conventional phone in a noisy room
• cell phone from a vehicle
• speakerphone
• cell phone from an area with bad service
• caller distracted by something else, not paying 100% attention to your Angel application!

3. Some audio editing tasks are very easy: such as cutting off unwanted space, taking out a few words, adding a bit more breathing space between clauses, adjusting volume, or cloning half a sentence from another prompt. Excellent free editing tools are:

• Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) for editing WAV files
• Switch ( http://www.nch.com.au/switch/ ) for converting sound files to various formats

Rather than requesting fresh recordings (usually 5 to 10 business days) where recycled or slightly adjusted phrases would be sufficient…do it yourself with these tools! It is fun, and you might be able to deliver good results in 15 minutes, for free.

4. Run every set of recordings through Switch to be sure they are in the correct format, and optimized for best sound on your Angel.com phone system. If phrases sound static-y on the phone, wrong formatting is probably the culprit. Here are the proper settings:

• Output Format / Wave Encoder Option: PCM Uncompressed, 8000 Hz, 16 bits, Mono
• Options/Conversions tab, Audio Processing: Normalize files when converting, with peak level = 70%

5. Whether it’s an IVR system, a musical performance, telling a joke, or getting a child’s attention: timing is extremely important in the delivery. Your chief weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency…no, strike that, your chief weapon for IVR is a short silence.

Using Audacity, make a set of three “spacer” sound files that are nothing but silence, with lengths 500 milliseconds, 1000, and 2000.  Use these silences throughout your Angel.com voice site wherever a short pause would make your system’s delivery more easily understandable to your callers:

• Before or after pronouncing data from a variable
• Wherever you especially want the caller to pay attention to the phrase that comes next (grab the attention with a second of silence)
• Wherever you want to give the callers a moment to think about or process what you just told them, such as a phone number or URL you want them to write down
• At the beginning of a menu (1 second of silence is much more effective than inserting any cliched message begging for attention “as our menus have changed”)
• Between the options within a menu, giving a moment where the callers can decide if that’s the one they want
• Wherever the topic of your presentation is changing, such as a paragraph break within a Frequently Asked Questions message
• More!