Getting started for application developers

Speech Suite is primarily a runtime environment for testing and deploying applications. A typical application workflow:

Natural language conversations

Natural language understanding or "open-dialog" enables users to interact with systems and devices in their own words without being constrained by a fixed set of responses. This conversational experience allows individuals to self-serve and successfully resolve issues within the IVR, while interacting with the system naturally, in their own words.

For example, a caller wishing to pay a credit card bill might navigate to the pay-bill dialog from a financial services main menu and respond to a virtual assistant's open-ended prompt with "Pay $100 to Visa from my savings account." Confirmation swiftly follows.

System

Thank you for calling, how may I help you?

Open-ended prompt

Caller

Pay $100 to Visa from my savings account.

INTENT: pay_bill

PAYEE slot received

AMOUNT slot received

FROM_ACCOUNT slot received

System

Ok, great.... Just to confirm, you'd like to pay ... ... $<100.00> ... ... from account ... ... <123412341234> ... ... to your ... ... <VISA> ... ... and the payment will go through ... ... <today>. Should I go ahead and submit it?

DATE slot not explicitly provided but inferred
Caller Yes Final confirmation
System The payment has been submitted. Your confirmation is ... ... <123 456 789>. ... ... To hear that again, say "repeat that." Otherwise, you can say "main menu" or if you're done you can hang up.  

Directed dialog conversations

Contrast this user experience with a directed dialog conversation, in which the IVR system collects and confirms a single slot at each step of the dialog.

System

Which bill would you like to pay?

INTENT: pay_bill

Caller

My Visa card.

PAYEE slot received
System Ok, your ... ... <VISA>. ... How much would you like to pay? PAYEE slot confirmed
Caller $100

AMOUNT slot received

System Ok, ... <$100.00>. ... From which account? AMOUNT slot confirmed
Caller Savings FROM_ACCOUNT received
System Ok, your ... <savings>. ... And when would you like the payment to go through? You can say "today," "tomorrow," or tell me another date. FROM_ACCOUNT confirmed
Caller Today DATE slot received

System

Thanks. ... Just to confirm, you'd like to pay ... ... $<100.00> ... ... from ... ... <savings> ... .... account ... ... <123412341234> ... ... to your ... ... <VISA> ... ... and the payment will go through ... ... <today>. Should I go ahead and submit it?

Final confirmation

Caller Yes Final confirmation received
System The payment has been submitted. Your confirmation is ... ... <123 456 789>. ... ... To hear that again, say "repeat that." Otherwise, you can say "main menu" or if you're done you can hang up.