Type
Application Item (basic) node
Purpose
The purpose of this node is to present the caller with a limited series, or menu, of options. The caller must respond to these options using either touchtone (DTMF) key presses or spoken responses.
Behavior
When placed in the call flow, this node sets up a framework to construct a menu of options for callers, mostly through the options offered on the node editor palette. One palette option, in particular, is optimized for use with this node: the Choice item. Use this item, along with Prompt and Grammar items, to designate the options available to the caller, thus creating the menu.
When you place an Menu item in the call flow, Dialog Designer automatically creates a complex variable with the same name. A complex variable contains the following fields, which are populated upon completion of the node:
- confidence - A number between 0.0 and 1.0 that expresses the degree of confidence the system has that it has correctly recognized the caller utterance. The number 0.0 indicates minimum confidence, and the number 1.0 indicates maximum confidence. The specific interpretation of this number depends on the ASR platform.
- utterance - A text (raw string) summary of what the caller said or keyed in, as recognized by the ASR engine. In the case of a DTMF response, this is the digit sequence of keys that the caller pressed.
- inputmode - The mode in which the caller input was provided, either voice or DTMF.
- interpretation - The contents of the interpretation tag, as provided by the ASR engine. In other words, this is the result of how the ASR engine recognized and mapped the utterance. If the ASR engine is unable to provide an interpretation, this field remains undefined.
- value - If the ASR engine returned an interpretation, this field takes on the same value as the interpretation field. If not, this field takes on the value of the utterance field (or other optional fields depending on the Record Utterance and Collect Mark Data properties).
Once the ASR engine returns a recognition result and populates these Input variable fields, you can use the outcome to further direct the call.
It is always a good idea to give callers the option to use either a spoken reply or a
DTMF key press to select a choice. For example, you can create a prompt for a
choice that says, "To hear about your savings options, press one or say "savings."
Then, when setting up the Choice item, you both use an ASR grammar for
"savings" and enter 1 in the DTMF field.
Properties
- Name - Enter a name that reflects the central purpose of the node. Use naming conventions for Java components. See Naming Java Components.
- Comments - Enter any comment you want to add as a reminder or description of the purpose or content of the node. You can leave this field blank.
Dialog Designer uses the text you enter in this property field for the pop-up hint
that appears when your mouse hovers over the node icon in the workspace. If
you leave this blank, Dialog Designer uses the name of the node for the pop-up
hint.
- Record Utterance - (True/False). Used for capturing the caller's spoken utterance.
- Collect Mark Data - (True/False). Used for capturing the most recently encountered mark in a prompt.
- Record Utterance - (True/False). When true, additional fields are added to the variable that store the recording of the caller's utterance, the size of the recording (in bytes) and the duration of the recording (in milliseconds).
- Collect Mark Data - (True/False). When true, additional fields are added to the variable that store the name of the last Mark encountered by the VoiceXML platform as well as the time elapsed since the mark was processed.
- Location - (Read-only) Displays the location of the node graphic in the workspace.
- Bind Name to Node - (True/False). When true, the name of the variable item is bound to the name of the node. When the parent node is renamed, the name of the variable item is renamed as well; keeping the name of the variable in sync with the node name.
Default Node Structure (Node Detail Editor Flow)
There is no default flow in the node editor for this node.
Tip: