Chapter 14. Help Strategies

No matter how carefully you design and craft your voicebot, chances are that users will at some point need help interacting with it. They may need help simply because they are novice users of voicebots, or they may need help because at some point in their interaction with your voicebot, they encountered a problem and need some guidance to get the conversation back on track.

The keys to successful help are (1) relevance, (2) actionability, and (3) brevity. Provide help when, and only when, it is needed; provide information the user can act on; and provide only as much information as is needed and not more.

The next sections give you guidelines that should inform your design and implementation of a truly helpful voicebot.

Tell the User That Help Is Available

What good is a help system if the user is not aware that it exists? If you expect a good portion of your voicebot’s users to be first-time or infrequent users, let them know from the opening prompt that they can ask for help, and tell them exactly how they can ask for help (“If at any point you need help, just say ‘help me.’”). By the same token, If you are able to tell that the user is not engaging the voicebot for the first time, then suppress the language about the existence of help.

Detect When the User Needs Help

A user who is not answering your voicebot’s request (no-input) or is answering it with language that the voicebot does not understand (no-match), is probably a confused user and therefore ...

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