The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice

Vision Clips/Sample Calls

As an alternative ”or an enhancement ”to a call flow diagram, the designer may want to create a vision clip to describe how the application will work. This is a sample script that illustrates a vision of how the final version of the system might sound. (Not to be confused with a sample call, which typically refers to a recording of an actual exchange from a live system.) The clip is produced as an audio file, complete with sound effects or music. For many designers, a vision clip is a very easy place to start the creative process, because before they start drawing boxes and arrows on paper, they can quickly sketch out the sound ”and feel ” of the system and show and play it to other people for quick review.

Sharing a vision clip with a client is a great way for designers to initiate a discussion of their design ideas. But it's important to remind clients that the vision clip is only a rough draft and subject to change. A vision clip can also help jump-start the process of structuring the overall call flow.

All you need to do to create a vision clip is to form a grid like this

and then insert prompts in the places where the system speaks, and reasonable answers in the places where the caller responds. Although you may not have finalized what the system will ultimately do, the vision clip serves as an easy way for almost anyone to understand the design of the basic flow and feel of the system.

A simple vision clip for a banking system might look like this.

Vision clips are particularly useful on large, multi-phase projects that begin with basic functionality and become more complex over time. By showing how the final version of the project will work, these vision clips can help clients understand how their initially sparse application will expand elegantly over time.

Uses of Vision Clips and Call Flow Diagrams

Designers should present vision clips to clients to launch a discussion on how the system will work ”both for callers and with back-end databases. As clients read (or hear) the vision clips and then look at the diagrams, they gain a basic understanding of how the design handles the most common calls. The vision clips should, of course, be consistent with the Requirements Specification and will logically illustrate the salient elements of that document.

The Top Five Tenets of Vision Clip Design

1. Ensure that the vision clip captures one or more common scenarios callers will experience.

2. Produce vision clips that are highly illustrative of the salient functionality and not exhaustive of every possible case. Clients can generally extrapolate other similar or common cases from a well- chosen and produced vision clip.

3. Present secondary (and tertiary ) clips to show off separate functions of the system, such as error handling, complex situations, or how the system works for different types of callers (that is, novices versus experienced ).

4. Start by presenting the least complex vision clip when presenting several vision clips to a client. This vision clip should illustrate the designer's ability to craft a simple dialogue well. Then present the remaining clips in order of complexity, building on the fundamentals of the previous clips.

5. Use vision clips early in the design process since they enable designers to get early feedback from clients, and then rewrite them for another round of feedback before beginning the long process of creating the Design Specification.