The Elements of Voice First Style

Chapter 26. Coda

Building voicebots is a craft, and if you want to learn a craft you must practice it every single day. No book or manual, no matter how good, can ever replace actual practice. You must create from scratch and learn from both your mistakes and your successes. But mainly from your mistakes. A manual can at best provide you with concepts and describe tricks and techniques. It can help you figure out where to start and how to start, how to formulate a strategy for tackling problems and, when it is a really good manual, it can help you ask the right questions. But by itself, a manual is never enough. You will not be able to build a great voicebot by simply reading this book, or any book.

Building great voicebots—as is the case with building anything that will survive the real world—is hard. It requires years of patient learning by doing. If you want to become a great voicebot professional, make sure that you are always in the process of building a voicebot. This means thinking about things like: How do I structure a sequence? How do I craft a prompt? How do I ensure that the user knows how to get the conversation back on track when it goes sideways? How do I get the voicebot to understand what the user is trying to do? and How do I make it as easy as possible for the user to do what they want to do with the voicebot? But you must do much more than simply think. You must also try things out: i.e., talk to your voicebot, listen to how it responds, how it sounds, what ...