Outlook Voice Access and the English language
Steve, who reads my blog mailed me with a problem he's got with Outlook Voice Access. It made me giggle...
We’re delighted with our in house Outlook Voice Access, but it’s caused great amounts of laughter in the office all at my expense! Sometimes we have meetings with the initials of attendees in the subject header, and sometimes we sign emails with our initials. This is great for most people and I already know James has blogged about the abbreviation ‘MS’ coming up as manuscript, but have you heard what my initials come up as?!! ‘SJ’ is converted kindly into ‘Society of Jesus’!!!
Stupid question that I’m hoping for a positive answer to, but is there any way you can customise the Voice Access files to tell it not to read certain abbreviations in a certain way? We don’t want to go the whole hog and change the voice to that of Ozzy Osbourne (although how cool would that be!), but we do want to stop the mickey taking!
Well I had no idea how to help. I know James has blogged about some strange responses in the past which I assumed was down to Exchange pre-SP1 oddness. So I asked the product team.
Who couldn't reproduce the issue. The US language version of OVA reads the initials out "as is" and doesn't give any bizarre alternatives, or assumes these letters are acronyms at all.
So now I'm intrigued. Does Australian English differ? or do the initials SJ mean something entirely different in Australia? - I don't have the Australian language pack installed any more so I can't test it at the moment :) Please let me know...
And is there a solution?
Unfortunately not apparently. The Text To Speech (TTS) module isn't configurable in this version - so Steve will have to endure hilarity in his office for the foreseeable future - or select some different initials, perhaps putting in his middle initial.
Or - perhaps change his job role to something more evangelist like?...
