Print

Design for modularity

When you are planning your speech application, be alert to places where you can reuse parts of the application in two or more places. Then, when designing and building the application, you can create these parts as modules that you can reuse wherever you need that functionality.

If you plan for these modules ahead of time, you can also develop them before developing your main application project file. That way, they are already available when you create your main application.

For example, you might want to collect bank account or credit card numbers from callers at several points in the call flow. You have figured out that it is the same basic process each time you need to collect such numbers. Therefore, you might want to create a speech project module that you can reuse in your master application whenever you need to collect this type of information from callers.

Using this modular approach to application design has several advantages:

A team of developers can work on separate pieces of an application separately and then merge their efforts.