Slow down Twilio's TwiML “Say” command for standard text on text-to-speech

Question

How can I slow down a normal content inside the "Say" verb? The spanish accent is VERY fast and most people have trouble following/understanding what is said. Ideally something like the following would be perfect:

<Say voice="woman" language="es" speed="0.5">El siguiente mensaje se repetirá en español</Say>

Note I made up the speed="0.5" param. That is not an option for twilio but slowing the reading of the content of that "Say" verb by half is what I am looking for.

I don't think this is currently supported in any explicit way so ideas on how to accomplish this more hackish are welcome too. Text is dynamic.

Thank you for your insight.

Proposal

Answer 1

Friendly Neighbourhood Twilio Evangelist here:

Could I suggest you use Twilio's new voice, 'Alice', I think she sounds a lot better, but I'm afraid I don't speak Spanish so it's difficult to test:

<Say voice="alice" language="es-ES">...</Say>

Hope this helps!

Galliett

That is still pretty fast. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction though. twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/say The slowest one is es-MX Alice or the standard spanish male. – Proposal

Answer 2

You can configure the default voice Twilio uses for each locale in the Twilio Console here.

In particular, you can set it to the “Kimberly” or “Kendra” Amazon Polly voice, both of which are noticeably slower than the default “Salli” voice.

There are also clunkier solutions like adding a , comma, or period between each word, but they break the natural flow of reading the sentence. Those solutions work better for slowing the reading of numbers, like described in this StackOverflow question.

Bluebird