Designing Dialogue Flow
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An effective dialogue is the key component to a successful interaction between a voice-only application and a user. A voice-only application interacts with the user entirely without visual cues. The dialogue flow must be intuitive and natural enough to simulate two humans conversing. It must also provide a user with enough context and supporting information to understand the next action step at any point in the application.
Because multimodal applications feature a graphical user interface (GUI) with which users interact, developers do not design dialogs for them. A hands-free application is an exception to this rule.
Note Hands-free applications contain both a GUI and dialog-flow components, and provide users with both verbal and visual confirmations. A dashboard navigation system in a car is an example of a hands-free application. A user speaks to the application and the application speaks to the user, and a visual cue appears on a map, based on the user's input. Because hands-free applications are essentially voice-only applications that developers extend to include multimodal functionality, the process of creating hands-free applications is not explicitly covered in this documentation.
Use the following list as a suggested task order when designing a dialogue for a voice-only application.
- Determine the information items that the application requires from the user.
- Determine the commands a user can speak to exit the current dialog, ask for help, or perform other tasks that are not within the scope of the current dialog.
- Model a dialogue flow (which consists of one or many question and answer cycles) using Microsoft Visio, or a similar tool, to represent the branches and sequence that the application's questions and answers require.
- Determine which prompts the application will speak to the user, including those in response to commands, silence, and recognition failure.
- Determine which grammars the application will use to recognize user speech.
| To | See |
|---|---|
| Get more information on designing dialogs. | Modeling Question and Answer Cycles |
| Get more information on creating dialogs. | Creating and Configuring Question and Answer Dialogs |
| Get more information on enabling speech recognition. | Providing Access to Speech Recognition |
| Get more information on testing speech and telephony input. | Specifying and Testing User Input |
| Get more information on prompts and prompt functions. | Speaking to Users |
| Get more information on using event handlers. | Handling Client-side Events |
| Get more information on enabling user commands. | Providing Options for Users |
| Get more information on specifying the activation order of Speech Controls. | Specifying the Evaluated Activation Order of Controls |
| Get more information on setting default property values. | Specifying Default Speech Control Properties |