An announcement is a piece of audio your PBX plays to callers: an IVR greeting, a closed-hours message, a queue context line. Create one once and point as many things at it as you like, because the audio is independent of everything referencing it.
Overview
Create an announcement once and reference it from any number of places: IVRs use them as the menu prompt, call flow Play announcement steps play them mid-call, and queues use them as positional announcements. The audio is independent of its references, so editing or replacing the file updates everywhere it is used.
| Source | What it is | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Uploaded file | A pre-recorded MP3, WAV, FLAC, or AAC file up to 20 MB | Professional recordings, branded greetings, anything where voice nuance matters |
| Text to speech | TTS generated from a written message and a chosen voice | Frequently-changing announcements, multi-language variants, quick iteration |
Files are converted internally to telephony-friendly codecs, so you do not need to pre-convert them.
What it does
The Source field shapes everything else, and switching source does not preserve fields from the previous one.
When Source is Text to speech, a three-step panel appears: select a voice (filtered by language, gender, accent, use case), write your message (up to 5,000 characters, previewable aloud), and adjust four voice settings before generating:
- Stability (0-1): lower is more expressive, higher more consistent. Default 0.5.
- Similarity boost (0-1): how closely to match the trained voice. Default 0.75.
- Style (0-1): how much character to inject. Default 0.
- Speed (0.7x-1.2x): playback tempo. Default 1.0.
Generate to synthesize the audio. Editing a TTS announcement later keeps the message and settings so you can iterate.
See also
- IVRs - the most common consumer of announcements.
- Call flows - the Play announcement and Text to speech steps that play announcements mid-call.
- Music on hold - separate but related: audio for callers waiting in queues.
- Sound files - the dashboard that groups all three audio types.