Voice Response Application Development Roadmap
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The following steps provide a general outline for developing a voice response application using Speech Server.
- Read Preliminary Design Considerations.
Pay special attention to issues that might impact your application design. This documentation area covers issues such as writing secure code, 64-bit development, thread management, resource management, and dialog design. - Find a sample that illustrates an application similar to the one you want to develop. For more information, see Sample and Reference Applications.
- Browse through Speech Server Tutorials.
Completing the tutorials will provide a general understanding of the voice response application development process using Speech Server tools and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. - Choose one of the Speech Server Programming Models.
Your voice response application can be a Web-based application (using VoiceXML or SALT), a managed code application (using Windows Workflow), or a managed code application that wraps a Web-based application. - Create a voice response application project.
- For Web-based applications, see Create VoiceXML Application Projects or Create SALT Voice Response Application Projects.
- For managed code applications (including applications that wrap a Web-based application), see??Create Managed Code Voice Response Applications.
- Create application grammars.
A grammar consists of a structured list of rules that identify words or phrases that can be used for speech recognition. These rules provide the guidelines that an application uses when collecting spoken input. The guidelines are used to mimic or anticipate possible speech patterns from users and restrict the words or phrases that can be recognized by the application. For more information, see Develop Grammars with Speech Grammar Tools. - Design and implement a dialog workflow or framework.
A voice-only application interacts with the user entirely without visual cues. The dialog flow must be intuitive and natural enough to simulate two humans conversing. It must also provide a user with enough context and supporting information to understand the next action step at any point in the application. For an introduction, see Understand Speech Application Dialog Design and then see the following:- For Web-based applications, see Design Dialog Flow for procedural information and Creating the Dialog Framework for an example of Web-based dialog design.
- For managed code applications, see Confirmation and Validation of the User's Response and Validation of the User's Response for procedural information and Creating the Dialog Workflow for an example of managed code dialog design.
- Create application prompts.
Voice response applications use prompts to greet users, provide information to users, ask questions to users, and direct users to take specific actions. For more information, see Develop Prompts with Speech Prompt Tools. - Debug your application. For more information, see Debug Speech Applications.
- Deploy your application. For more information, see Speech Application Deployment.
- Tune your application. For more information, see Speech Application Analysis and Tuning.