Keep the Conversation Going with Suggestive Responses

There are over 30,000 Amazon Alexa Skills and north of 2,000 Google Actions in the market. Many of them focus on single actions such as “play my favorites playlist” or “what’s the tip of the day?”. The others fall into more of a conversational role where the voice app can handle several different requests. One common issue is that the conversation stops after the first question is asked then answered. This usually happens because the end-user doesn’t really know what else to ask. Alexa and Google both provide a Help feature but many end-users don’t know this is available in voice app conversations. There’s a simple way to use built in features from Alexa and Google to help solve this problem.

A voice app conversation should follow the same rules as a one-to-one human conversation. If the person you’re talking to doesn’t know what to ask you sometimes have to guide him or her through the conversation. Adding a question to the end of a statement or answer helps to keep the conversation moving. If you don’t add a question the conversation either stops or feels awkward. You can think of it as if you were being interviewed, except you can direct the conversation to different topics by posing a question. In a voice app, this can be achieved by appending a question to the end of an answer in conjunction with a question re-prompt.

For example, if someone started a conversation like this: “What was it like to skydive?”; I could answer, “It was an exhilarating experience. It was a beautiful partly cloudy day and I ended up jumping through clouds. There’s so much that goes into skydiving. You can ask me about the training, the plane or specific details about my jump.” The last part of the conversation is really a directive to help continue the conversation in a few specific areas.

In a conversational voice app, a leading question should follow most statements and answers to keep that conversation flowing in the direction you want. This can be achieved by using the Re-prompt object in both Alexa and Google’s Dialogflow. When building a response, just append the re-prompt content to the answer/statement. Then explicitly call the re-prompt to trigger if the end-user doesn’t say anything. With careful planning, this simple step can really help to create a more conversational app.

If you want to learn more about how to build compelling voice conversations, check out the Voicify Experience Platform.