There are four ways that information is communicated to the caller in CU*Talk:
  1. Static Audio Prompts/Custom Prompts – these are the CU-defined welcome messages, hours and locations. (NO SPANISH OPTION CURRENTLY.)
  2. Text to Speech – a custom option for the credit union in which information is grabbed from CU*BASE and communicated via a text to speech program in CU*Talk. This can include the welcome message, hours and locations, and rate descriptions and their corresponding rates. (NO SPANISH OPTION CURRENTLY.)
  3. Intrinsic Prompts – standard menus and task prompts. For example, “Press 2 for transfers.” These are not configurable and are the same for all credit unions. (SPANISH OPTION AVAILABLE.)
  4. Data from CU*BASE – member information from CU*BASE. This includes amounts, rates, account suffixes and dates. For example, the date and dollar amount of a transaction. Or the rate for a particular product. (NEW-SPANISH OPTION AVAILABLE.)
 
Before, a message might have followed this pattern: intrinsic prompt + data + intrinsic prompt + data. For example, “The last transaction on account 010 is dated August 14, 2011 in the amount of $15.00.” 
 
If the Spanish option is enabled, previously the system would read the intrinsic prompts (green) in Spanish, and all the data (red) was read in English. With the changes made in August 2011, DATA from CU*BASE is read in Spanish, too. That means instead of the system alternating between Spanish and English awkwardly, it’ll all be Spanish.
 
RATES
Rates are a little special as credit unions have two choices:
  1. Using custom prompts (no TTS) – the credit union fills out a form with the prompts for loan products (custom prompt) and then the actual rate is pulled from CU*BASE (DATA). Before, this meant everything was in English. Since August 2011, the custom prompt is in English, but the rate itself is said in Spanish.
  2. Text to Speech (TTS) – all the information comes from a single location and the rate is not pulled as data from CU*BASE. Both the prompt and the rate are in English.
 
In order for Spanish options to be available for the custom prompts and text-to-speech, CU*Answers would need to investigate the availability and cost of a separate Spanish-language TTS engine; no plans are in place at the current time to proceed in that direction.


NOTE: the existing TTS engine reads phonetically anything it doesn't recognize in its library. If you include Spanish words in your CU*BASE TTS configuration, the TTS engine will not likely be able to recognize the word resulting in an odd delivery to the caller. It is not suggested that Spanish terminology be included in your configuration.