December 21, 2021
December 21, 2021
Proficient leaders are always on the lookout for business productivity boosting tools. Text to speech service (TTS) is one such tool that promises significant time and cost savings for an organization. Although TTS is widely used in several fields such as education, these days more and more industry sectors are recognizing the benefits of TTS and adopting this amazing technology.
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Text to speech services are generally used by businesses /companies for artificial production of human speech used in Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Its working is quite simple. Words in the form of text are entered into the software which instantly converts it into audio which is then used in IVR. An IVR then uses this audio to interact with callers, such as greeting the caller, presenting a menu of options to help the caller navigate to the right department, etc.
Text to speech service is usually integrated with a cloud based business phone system along with several other features. The overall pricing is usually reasonable but still many businesses take the risk of opting for the ‘free’ text to speech software that are available for download on the internet. However, doing so might not be a wise move as it would cause more harm than the expected benefits. In this post, we will be talking about the 10 reasons to why businesses should not go for free text to speech service:
Free software is usually developed by naïve developers trying their hands on different programming concepts and technologies. There is no guarantee whether these software are properly tested for their functionality and working and may generate bugs and errors. Using free text to speech software, one may experience incorrect voiceover for the entered text which might be dangerous for a business’s reputation.
Would you put your computer system and data at risk just to use free software? The developers behind freeware are generally not known and there’s no assurance that these software will not interfere with your computer system. Also, it is a known fact that freebies are a common attacking tool used by hackers and cyber attackers as they generally come with malware to compromise user devices. So, there are high chances that businesses using free text to speech software might become victims of cyber-attack.
It is a common scenario to experience a lot of advertisements that keep appearing while using free software. This tactic is used by software developers to earn money through paid ads. Most of the time these advertisements are in the form of videos for which one has to wait till it finishes in order to use the software. These ads can also redirect the user to a third party website whether clicked intentionally or accidentally. Obviously, it is annoying for users as it wastes time and creates pauses in the workflow.
A software may offer free services initially, say for 30 days, but once a certain period expires, it asks for money to continue usage. This is done to attract users and once they get habitual with the software, they are being forced to pay for further use. Switching to another free TTS will mean work to be done all over again or may cause irregularity in the IVR audio which does not sound professional.
You can think of free software as orphan software. There’s no user guide or information about how the software works, the technologies being used in its development, the vendor behind the software and so on. Without all this information, how can it be trusted for business usage where there’s so much critical data and processes involved.
Consider a situation where while using a software you face any issue or problem with its working but there’s no support service available to help. Imagine how helpless it would leave you. You have to deal with it yourself or hire someone to get it fixed. With free software, this happens almost all the time. The reason behind this is because developers do not get any financial benefits for providing support services with freeware.
Freeware is usually an end product of a developer’s trial for some product code, hence these kinds of software are not developed keeping in mind the end users. Being more oriented towards the needs of the software developer, user-friendliness remains a key issue and therefore it may be difficult to operate for users who generally have no/minimal technical know-how.
Free Software is developed and made available to the public, but rarely developers pay attention to provide updates or develop further. Or they may provide updates for some time, but then lose interest with time and move onto some other project. With this, the software becomes obsolete and leaves the users with no choice but to move to a reliable TTS software which are generally paid.
Free software generally provides limited features. In case of text to speech software, the voice translation may sound more robotic i.e. the accent and pronunciation and thus may not fit well with the image of the business. Also, you may experience speed issues with the audio which further makes it unsuitable for business communication.
A global business might need to set IVR in different languages because it has employees and clients from all over the world. Therefore, they need a text to speech software with multilingual support so that callers can be presented with an IVR in the language understood or preferred by them. But in case of freeware, it is rarely possible to get this facility as they are limited to one language and can convert text to just one language.
KloudTalk is a reliable cloud based business phone system that offers text to speech service that converts text to high quality audio which works well for businesses of all sizes and complexity. To know further, you can read our post on How to choose the best IVR provider.
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