CVG 1.21.0 (04-April-2022)

The fourth day in the fourth month of the year is of special significance for us who have VIER (meaning four) in our name. To celebrate, today we’re releasing a new language, new help, new ways to unlock outbound calls, and - using Microsoft neural voices - a new way for bots to express emotions.

French UI

It’s been six months since we released German, the second language for our previously English-only UI. Now, as a result of further internationalization, French is the third UI language. Did you know that the world language French is spoken by about 321 million speakers on all continents in over 50 countries?

The UI language (English, French or German) is detected automatically. You can also change the language manually: Click on your user name in the top right corner and select Settings.

Contextual Direct Help

If you feel a little lost on the CVG user interface or want to get more information about a current action, you can use the contextual direct help feature. The contextual help links you to that article of the user manual that provides the content relevant to you.

Contextual help is available from the small information icon at the bottom right of the UI on many pages.

If you are already familiar with the CVG UI and do not want to have the small icon always displayed, you can also hide it under Settings, Direct Help.

Allowing Outbound Calls

Until now it was necessary for an administrator of VIER to activate outgoing calls for a CVG project and thus the bot. Such outgoing calls are needed e.g. for

• an agent handover to a contact center via /call/forward.

• an agent handover to a contact center with live transcription of the ongoing call for agent assist via /call/bridge.

• Bots that initiate calls via /call/dial.

You as reseller/customer/account/project admin can now also allow outgoing calls if enabled on the appropriate level.

Use of Microsoft-TTS-specific SSML Enhancements

Compared to plain text, SSML allows voice dialog developers to fine-tune the speaking rate, volume, pitch, pronunciation, and more of the text-to-speech (TTS) output.

For a subset of the neural voices, Microsoft additionally offers an SSML extension to adjust the speaking style to express different emotions like cheerfulness, empathy, and calm. You can optimize the voice for different scenarios like customer service, newscast, and voice assistant. With roles, the same voice can act as a different age and gender.

You can use this <mstts:express-as> element now in SSML-formatted TTS announcements just like in this example:

<mstts:express-as style="cheerful">
    That would be just amazing!
</mstts:express-as>

Check if the used voice supports styles and roles

Use the overview table provided by Microsoft to determine supported styles and roles for each neural voice. If a style or role isn't supported, the service uses the default neutral speech.

Use of Microsoft-specific SSML enhancements inhibit fallbacks

Please be aware that fallbacks to other TTS providers are not possible when using Microsoft-specific TTS enhancements.

Smaller UI Improvements

Autocomplete for Language Selection

To make it faster and easier for you to set the right language for your bot, i.e. your CVG project, we have built a filter into the language selection that enables a kind of autocomplete. Thus, it is no longer necessary to scroll through the list of now over 60 languages.

Single-Number Phone Number Blocks

A single-number phone number block is pretty unusual but possible. We improved the visualization of such a single-number phone number block.