Phrase Macros and Voice Prompts

Phrase macros are FreeSWITCH's smart way to reuse, concatenate, and combine sound files into voice prompts to be played in calls.

Voice prompts are what you hear when you call into any kind of IVR, digital assistant, and so on. The most infamous of them is, "All our operators are busy at the moment, please hold on."

Voice Prompts history

Voice prompts used to be of two kinds: the very costly kind, recorded by professional actors, using high-end audio gear in professional studios, cut and polished by sound engineers in post-production. The other kind was the free-as-in-beer, do-it-yourself, very similar to the answering machine message recorded by the company secretary, unprofessional, with background noises, wavering volume, and so on.

There was nothing between those two extremes. Also, a lot of work went into recording and re-recording new prompts, reading text aloud. Such effort (and cost) made totally impractical for voice applications to read an often updated...