Dynamics 365 Contact Center – Audio Files in IVR

Within Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Contact Center (aka Omnichannel for Customer Service) we create an IVR using Copilot Studio. It is possible to add audio clips into your IVR, in this post I will look at how and why.

Within an IVR we can use Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to control how Copilot Studio says certain phrases. For example, we can control the accent used by the BOT, add pauses into sentences and add emphasis to certain words.

We can also use SSML to play an audio clip. (As described below.)

In my example I will also explain how we can add messages to long running actions. Keep in mind this is just an example …. You can “obviously” insert audio clips into any message / question within your IVR.

Step One – Host an audio file

Any audio files you wish to play will need to be publicly available on the internet.

For my test, I downloaded a short clip of the clicks a keyboard makes as we type. I’ll explain why later!

You should find loads of websites that offer clips like this that are royalty-free and free to download. I used pixabay.com, filtering on “sound effects”. I am sure you can find many other sources of audio files! Or maybe you could just create your own.

Next, I uploaded my clip into my WordPress blog. Simply so it was accessible on the Internet. You can access the clip I uploaded here.

Step Two – Create your SSML code

The code to play this clip from messages (and more) within Copilot Studio is simple enough.

The SSML tag I created is shown below. You can see that I am using the “audio” keyword and adding the URL to locate my clip.

<audio src="https://neilparkhurst.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/keyboard-typing-5997.mp3" />

I can now use this SSML within messages in my IVR. Although in my example I did something slightly different!

Step Three – Play audio on long running actions

My IVR includes several actions that trigger Power Automates. Most of the time these Flows run quickly, but what if they take longer than expected?? Then I’d like to give some feedback to the customer so that it’s obvious the BOT is “thinking”.

We can add latency messages to Power Automate actions. Until now I have added a text response like “One moment, please”. But if I’m honest a BOT that constantly repeats “One moment, please” can quickly become annoying.

So, I decided to add “keyboard clicks” as a latency message. The logic being the customer would hear the BOT typing and would realize it was working on their request. Of course you could think of other sound effects that might work as well or even better. Such as a clock ticketing or some other countdown timer.

Below you can see that I have added my SSML tag to the latency message on a Power Automate in my BOT. (Simply click “…” and select properties.)

Additionally, we have some properties which control when the audio clip will start and how long it will play for.

The delay property will govern how long before you clip starts. In my example, my Power Automate ran quickly! So as a test I made my delay parameter very small. It might be that you set this value so that no sound is played if the Power Automate returns a result quickly!

Next, we have the minimum playback time. This is the number of milliseconds my audio clip will play for as a minimum. I opted to make my clip play for at least 2 seconds. (aka 2000 milliseconds.)

Tip: You might want to keep the minimum playback time reasonably small. As even if your Flow completes quickly the audio will play for this minimum duration. (Which could be slowing down your BOT!)

Hopefully you agree this is a simple enhancement which can easily be used to enhance the customer experience of using your IVR.

Original Post https://neilparkhurst.com/2024/08/28/dynamics-365-contact-center-audio-files-in-ivr/