Prompts in SROs

SpeakRight speech objects (SROs) offer a highly-reusable approach to prompts. Recall that SRO classes are generated by the SROGen tool. Each SRO has an XML file that defines what code will be generated. The XML file contains the grammars and prompts for the SRO. You can modify this file and regenerate an SRO.

SROGen also generates an XML file holding the default prompts. This file is deployed and is read at runtime to load the SRO prompt fields. You can modify this file on a production system to modify the default prompts for an SRO; no re-compile (or restart) is necessary.

Here's what a prompt definition in the XML file looks like:

<prompt name="main1" def="no">What {%subject%} would you like?</prompt>

The prompt id main1, has a corresponding field in the SRO class called m_main1Prompt. A derived class, or a SR app, can modify the field using get/set methods.

This works fairly well with the PText feature {%fieldName%} for extracting values from a field.

Sub-Prompts
The one thing missing so far is the ability to define conditional prompts, such as a play-once prompt. You can do it in code of course, but that's not very flexible

if (executionCount() == 1) {
m_main1Prompt = "Let's get started. " + m_main1Prompt;
}

To remedy this, SROs support multiple sub-prompts to be defined for a single prompt, such as the MAIN prompt.

<prompt name="main1welc" group="MAIN" cond="once_ever">Let's get started.</prompt>
<prompt name="main1" group="MAIN" def="no">What {%subject%} would you like?</prompt>

Each prompt tag results in a field being created. Multiple prompts in the same group are rendered as a single VoiceXML prompt, in the order they occur in the XML file. The neat thing is that conditions can now be applied to individual sub-prompts. The cond attribute defines a condition. Here, "once_ever" means a play-once-ever condition. The first time the SRO is executed, the prompt will be: "Let's get started. What flight would you like?". On subsequent executions, the prompt is "What flight would you like?".

Implementation note: Sub-prompts are implemented using the m_subIndex field of Prompt. When prompts are rendered (in a PromptSet), all the rendered items are gathered together in the first sub-prompt. But since each sub-prompt is an independent Prompt object, its rendering can be enabled or disabled by its condition.