Application Design 
Rapid Prototyping with Voice Sites
Voice applications are hard to envision. Their ethereal nature poses a communications challenge. This month we look at rapid prototyping techniques to assist the voice application design process.
Why Prototype?
We arrive at useful designs for voice applications after countless communications with our audiences (primarily callers) who have a stake in the outcome. Having something concrete to share early in the process can facilitate feedback, encourage the exploration of alternatives, and make explicit a hypothesis or important principle. It's easier for someone to point out what's wrong in a picture than to draw the picture.
The idea is to invest at the beginning in formulating what the caller experience will sound like, and drive the rest of the implementation process from that standpoint. The earlier we make and uncover mistakes, the cheaper it will be to address them.
At a recent training event, I showed multiple customers how easy it was to turn their idea into a working proof-of-concept Voice Site. I used Text-to-Speech Voice Site Prototyping to do this. With Site Builder you can produce a working, call-in prototype of your voice application in minutes.
Here are a few tips to make the process efficient.
- You should focus on testing the flow of a dialog between callers and the computer. What matters most at this point is the wording of prompts and the keywords the system should listen for.
- Most of the time you do a prototype, you will be using Message, Question and Voicemail pages to get the basis down.
- It's OK to only recognize a small subset of answers during prototyping.
- If you're interested in finding out what callers other than you may respond with to a specific question, use a Voicemail page to capture their response. Then pretend you understood their response to be the most logical choice. This will give you a collection of sound files with utterances you can use to refine the design.
I find this to be the best way of prototyping. Below are the pros and cons of using Text-to-Speech prototyping followed by two other ways to prototype your voice site.
Two More Ways of Prototyping
1. Paper Prototype: A collection of written dialogs that provides broad outlines of the subjects being discussed between the caller and the system. See the February '05 Developers Corner for an example ("The Virtual Conversation" section).
2. Voice Sample Prototype: This is a recorded audio file, where two actors simulate a caller and the voice of the system, respectively. You can listen to an mp3 sample
What to do with the prototype
Once you have a prototype, share it! Make sure you get as many of your colleagues, partners, and especially customers / future callers to give you feedback as you can.
There are varying degrees of usefulness in the feedback you will get. The most important aspect to consider is: Will the system be highly usable? Will callers effectively get through the application and accomplish the goal they had in mind?
Conclusion
A little prototyping can go a long way towards easing the task of creating a great Voice Site. It's no coincidence that other creators start with prototypes. Painters do studies, architects do scale models. Voice designers build prototypes.
If you're working on an IVR project we'd love to talk to you! Give us a call at 888-692-6435 and say "Developer Hotline".
Sam Aparicio
