Constructing a dialog
The first steps in the grammar design process involve creating the dialog to which the caller will respond.
Many of the tasks addressed in this section are not exclusively related to grammar development, but are also an intrinsic part of the voice application development process as a whole.
As mentioned in Grammar design, determine the requirements for the grammar before making decisions about the grammar implementation:
- Defining information slots: Identify the information items and define the slots.
- Planning the dialog: Design the conversation between application and caller.
- Designing prompts: Design how the application requests caller speech.
- Predicting caller responses: Anticipate caller responses to the prompts.
By planning these aspects of your dialog carefully, it is much easier to decide a strategy for efficient grammars.
We look at all these steps in the same section because they tend to affect one another fairly directly. The information your application requires will determine the flow of your dialog; the dialog you design will guide your prompts; and the responses expected from those prompts may lead you to adjust the prompts, or even modify your dialog.
You may want to move back and forth between these steps relatively freely, or perform several iterations before moving on to create the grammar itself.
