Voice broadcasts can be used effectively to improve parent, student and staff communication, provided they are used correctly, professionally and within the guidelines of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
There are several distinct applications, such as automated attendance and lunch balance calls, scheduled communications, and facility closure or delayed opening notices that parents and staff welcome receiving from their district via this channel.
To guide your use of the voice broadcasting channel, we offer the following best practice tips for recording your own voice messages as .wav files, as well as for use of our text-to-speech recognition system:
1. Choose the Right Caller ID: Many recipients check the caller ID before they answer. You will get more live answers with a known caller ID. If you do not see the desired Caller ID as an option, contact Support to add a phone number for you.
2. Develop a Quality Script Between 35-45 Seconds: Write out what you need to convey; work on the copy to eliminate unnecessary words and information.
- Introduce yourself at the beginning of the voice message.
- Focus on the facts. Write short sentences with correct syntactic structure.
- Keep the message longer than 30 seconds, but less than 60 seconds, if possible. Studies suggest that recipients start to tune out after 40 seconds of listening.
3. Quality Voice & Recording: If recording your own message, the person speaking should have a clear, strong, friendly sounding voice. The recording should have good sound quality - no static, skips, and avoid long pauses at the outset of a recording, as a long pause can increase hang ups.
4. Text-to-Speech Specific Best Practices: To ensure proper use of our text to speech capabilities within SwiftK12, here are some hints:
- Phonetic Swapping: Separate potentially difficult to pronounce names with similar sounding words or phrases (example: Harambee would be written in your text to speech box as “Hair Aim Bay”)
- Abbreviations: Use capital letters when grammatically appropriate, applying standard conventions for representing numbers and abbreviations (“zero” versus “0”; U S D versus USD (US Dollar). If you feel that the abbreviation will still be too complicated to interpret by the individual, consider spelling out the word, instead. Remember, 'when in doubt, spell it out'.
- Separate Phone Numbers with Spaces: As the text-to-speech editor will read a series of numbers as an integer, if not appropriately separated (14012438432 should be written as 1 4 0 1 2 4 3 8 4 3 2)
5. Communicate in your Parent Population's Preferred Language: You can easily communicate to your parent population in their chosen/preferred language.
- The SwiftK12 communication Suite offers multi-language translation capabilities for both text-to-speech and email messages. The preferred language should be chosen in the student's settings and languages you desire to use should be added in Language Mappings in Settings.
- SwiftK12 currently supports 45 languages for text-to-speech and email messages including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese.
****Example Live Voice Message****
This is a reminder from Apple Grove High School that school will be closed on Thursday November 15th and Friday November 16th.
Also, all activities and sport events will be canceled. Classes and events will resume as normal on Monday November 19th. Please give us a call at 5 5 5-5 5 5-5 5 5 5.
This message will now repeat.