Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, The

Top Five Mistakes When Writing Prompts

1. Getting caught up in the details of the wording of an application before fully understanding its structure. This mistake can lead to lengthy rewriting of prompts if there becomes a need to change the structure of the application.

2. Writing overly verbose prompts.^[2] People always consider the context when they evaluate a question. It is important to maintain a balance between clarity and brevity.

   ^[2] To learn more about this see Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) pp. 30–31.

3. Repeating the initial prompt for the timeout and retry prompts. Timeout and retry prompts should provide additional information to clarify and guide the caller.

4. Using language not commonly ...