Following the recent episode of #testing-tuesday, in which @jan and I tested “The Muffin Man” by Chatty Creations, we got interested in whether voice apps should coventionally respond to some set of common requests beside help, stop and cancel requests.
Obvious candidates for such common requests might be:
- Change the volume! (A topic in ourt testing of The Muffin Man)
- What can I buy? (A required request for ISP Skills)
- Repeat! (A good reason to implement a repeat handler is that it’s especially frustrating if this utterances gets mapped to another intent)
- Launch a different Skill! (Something I get quite a bit in my Mau Mau game Skill, to my slight irritation
)
This topic touches upon two great talks I that come to my mind:
- Philip Hunter’s (of PulseLabs) Voice Summit 2018 talk on encouraging and rewarding users to be spontaneous and explorative with your voice app
- Lauren Kunze (of Pandorabots) on common interactions between users and chatbots across various domains (My recommendation is to skip the intro and start at about 4:30)
With these talks in mind, some more candidates for standard handlers are:
- Romantic/sexual approaches
- Abuse
- Thanks
- Chit-chat like “How are you?”, “Are you a person/machine?” or “How old are you?”
From there on there’s probably a long tail of utterances where the effort of implementing such a response would be in poor relation to the user value it brings.
So: What do you think, should there be a convention about which requests all Skills should handle? Which do you consider most relevant? Or did you already notice particular unexpected utterances that show up a lot in your own intent histories, and that you might have already implemented handlers for? Looking forward to the discussion!