Understanding Voice Subscriptions

This article will acquaint you with the concepts of Voice Subscriptions.

So, congratulations on getting your access to the Unifonic Voice Service. To get started, you would need to first get a caller ID. But wait, there seems to be a cost associated to each caller ID. What now?

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Only Main Accounts can have channels and caller ID subscriptions

This means that the callerIDs and channels will be shared by all subaccounts.

Caller ID Subscriptions

Caller ID are available for a monthly fee. This fee for the first month is deducted from your account at the point of subscription. This also means that if your account doesn't have the necessary balance to be deducted, you would not be able to get any caller ID into your account.

Monthly fee will then be deducted on the same day each month. So please ensure that your account has the necessary balance to prevent any auto-revoke of the caller ID subscription.

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I have paid annual subscription fee or I should have caller IDs as part of my contract?

If you have paid upfront the annual fee or if your service agreement has specified a certain number of caller IDs offered as part of the package, do check with our support team, [email protected] to assign caller IDs into your account manually.

Channel Subscriptions

Channels directly affect how many concurrent calls you can have at the same time. The more channels you have, the more concurrent calls you can have. To find out more, check this guide

Free Channels are given for each account by default. Customers can upgrade on the number of concurrency per origination country depending on their needs.

Additional channels are available for a monthly fee.

This fee for the first month is prorated, and deducted from your account at the point of subscription. This also means that if your account doesn't have the necessary balance to be deducted, you would not be able to get any additional channels into your account.

Thereafter, monthly fee will be deducted on the first day of each month. So please ensure that your account has the necessary balance to prevent any auto-revoke of the channel subscription.

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Downgrade or Upgrade

You can downgrade or upgrade on the channel subscription anytime. While downgrading do not result in the deduction of any prorated fees, upgrading does. So, it is important for users to be wary about making fickle changes on your channel subscription, resulting in unwanted costs.

You may also experience difficulty downgrading or upgrading your account due to overdue charges. See below for more information.

Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) Subscriptions

Any accounts can subscribe to Neural TTS Subscriptions.

The neural system outputs an audio file that boasts of a more natural and human-like text-to-speech voices, while the standard TTS voices utilizes concatenative synthesis, and is likely to produce more machine-like audio files. The neural system strings together (concatenates) the phonemes of recorded speech, producing very natural-sounding synthesized speech.

In order to get access to the Neural Text-to-Speech, you will need to subscribe to it. Simply navigate to Channels > Voice > Settings Tab.

You will find that your access to Standard Text-to-Speech is provided by default. While Neural Subscription comes with a monthly subscription fee. Hence, it is important to continue to maintain sufficient balance in the account.

To find out what languages are supported in Standard and Neural TTS engines, read this guide.

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New Neural Language Support

We are happy to announce that we now support Hindi in our Neural TTS engine!

After subscribing to Neural Text-To-Speech, you will notice that the neural option comes up in your audio library too.

You can also start using a different ttsEngine on your API requests too.

Subscription Suspension

As there are recurring fee for subscriptions, if there are insufficient balance in the account, attempts to charge your account may fail. As a result of that, your account might go into a lock-down state where subscriptions could not be scaled up or down. To unblock this, simply increase the balance of your account so that the deductions of your monthly fee can take place.

The system will attempt to process overdue charges on a daily basis. So, if you urgently need to make changes to your subscription and has topped up your account balance to process the overdued charges, please reach out to our customer support team.

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In case the system has failed in its attempts to process overdue charges for 21 days, your subscriptions would be revoked.