6 VUI and conversation best practices
This chapter covers
- Building on shared context
- Using user favorites and decaying context
- Intercepting requests and responses
- Unit testing
You already saw in chapter 3 that people have certain expectations of a conversation and are surprised when those aren’t upheld. Developers new to voice applications tend to create stiff conversations that ignore these user expectations. Newcomers, perhaps, are so deep in the terse, mechanical language of code that they temporarily forget what they’ve been doing since they were young. Thankfully, only a little bit of effort is needed to elevate the conversation, and only a little bit more to take it within sight of natural dialog.
6.1 Conversations and context
One of the conversations we built in chapter 5 was a back-and-forth between Alexa and the user, discussing whether the user was waking up for good, and how long had elapsed during their sleep. An example might go like so:
USER: Alexa, tell Super Sleeper that I’m awake.
ALEXA: Are you up for good?
USER: Yes.
ALEXA: You slept six hours and ten minutes. You woke up five times.
We can look at this conversation and examine it using Grice’s maxims, introduced in chapter 3, which outline well-formed interactions. The maxims were quantity, quality, relation, and manner:
- Quantity —Say enough, but not too much.
- Quality —Say the truth.
- Relation —Say something relevant to the conversation.
- Manner —Say it clearly.