Make It Modular

Creating Speech Applications with Dialog Designer > Planning Before You Build > Make It Modular

	Make It Modular

When planning a speech application, be alert to places where parts of the application can be reused in more than one place. Subsequently, when designing and building the application, create these parts as speech project modules that can reused wherever that functionality is needed.

If these modules are planned ahead of time, they can be developed before developing the main application project file. This way, they are already available when creating your main application.

For example, if bank account or credit card numbers need to be collected from callers at several points in the call flow, the same basic process to collect such numbers, regardless of the types of numbers, may be the same. Therefore, a reusable sub module in the master application might be the process of collecting account numbers from callers.

Advantages of Modular Design

Using a modular approach to application design has several advantages:

Develop once, use many times.There is a a tremendous efficiency advantage to have certain actions or options to be offered to callers in several places within the application.

Maintenance ease. It is easier to maintain the application, even if you are not reusing much of the code. When using a modular approach, code can be changed in one part of the application without necessarily requiring a rebuild of the entire application.

Debugging ease. It can make it easier to debug an application by being able to isolate the trouble areas where errors are occurring.

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

Process to Create Modules

The process of creating modules for reuse is a three step process, as follows:

Use Dialog Designer to create a speech project that contains the functionality for the module.

Export the speech or call control project to the correct directory for reusable dialogs.

Import the speech or call control project module into another speech or call control project.

See Deploying Projects as Dialog Designer Modules.