"If you are experiencing writers block, please press 1 now..."

I've made a lot of headway with Asterisk on OS X over the past couple of weekends (the only time I seem to find to work on personal projects of late).

The collection of applications I've finally gotten around to writing is a rather hodge-podge lot. None of them really have anything in common, other than they are telephone-based and I am writing them.

Which leads to my dilemma: what's the best way to present a main menu? Should I do synthesized speech (I quite like the Cepstral voices I purchased) for consistancy, or would it be better to record a real persons voice? If so, then who? (Certainly not my own; like many people I don't particularly care for the sound of my own voice...)

And regardless of whether I record someone speaking, or use the computer, I need something that won't bore the people who call (who admittedly will all likely be calling just as a personal favor). Yet whatever the menu is, it needs to explain things well enough that they know what option(s) they want to choose.

And so I feel stuck, going back and forth between ideas and approaches; and through it all I have yet to unleash my telephone applications on my unsuspecting friends & family. (Maybe they'd prefer it that way? ;-)

—Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, March 20, 2006 at 20:57