GUIDE

Asterisk and FreePBX IVR voice prompts with a natural voice

A phone menu is the first thing many customers hear: the greeting, the options, the after-hours message. Recording every change in a studio is slow, and robotic prompts make a company sound careless.

The free SuperClonica engine voices IVR prompts offline on your own computer with natural voices. This guide shows how to voice them, convert them to the 8 kHz format telephone systems use, and put them into Asterisk or FreePBX.

Browse voices Install the SuperClonica engine

What an IVR needs

Phone audio is narrowband: a clear, calm voice at a moderate pace works best.

  • A greeting that says who the caller has reached.
  • Menu options in a fixed pattern.
  • After-hours, holiday and queue messages.
  • Voicemail prompts.

Try your greeting free

On the page of any voice, type your greeting, 30 to 100 characters, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you can listen and download it, with no account.

Voice and convert the prompts

Keep one file per prompt, so changing one option does not mean redoing the whole menu.

  • Install the engine once: python -m pip install superclonica-cpu.
  • Voice each prompt: superclonica --text "Thank you for calling. For sales, press 1. For support, press 2." --voice F2 --lang en --normalize --output greeting.wav.
  • Convert it to 8 kHz mono for the phone system, for example with sox: sox greeting.wav -r 8000 -c 1 greeting-8k.wav, or with ffmpeg and -ar 8000 -ac 1.
  • In Asterisk, copy the file to the custom sounds folder, for example /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom/, and play it with Playback(custom/greeting-8k); in FreePBX, upload it under Admin, System Recordings.

Write prompts callers understand

Say who the caller has reached in the first sentence and keep the greeting short. Give options in one pattern, “For sales, press 1”, and put the most common option first. Write phone numbers digit by digit with spaces, 5 5 5, 0 1 2 3, because digits written together are read as one large number, and write opening hours in words. The same text, voice and seed always give the same audio, so a new prompt matches the old ones.

Voices and consent

For a business line, use a voice you have the rights to: the ten stock voices of the model are free under the model license, or train a voice in the SuperClonica studio from a recording of an employee or speaker who agreed. Never use a voice that imitates a real person without consent, and do not let callers mistake the synthetic voice for a live agent.