Dynamic Menus with VoiceModel

There is a new example in the VoiceModel project that shows how to create dynamic menus. Dynamic menus can be very useful in voice applications where you want to configure how the menus work in some persistence mechanism, allowing you to change the flow of the application without recompiling and redeploying, or if you want to tailor it to a specific user based based on their personal preferences.

Here is the code in this new example:

public override CallFlow BuildCallFlow()
{
    CallFlow flow = new CallFlow();

    flow.AddState(ViewStateBuilder.Build("greeting", "myMenu", new Say("greeting", "Welcome to the dynamic menu example.")), true);
    //This is a fake service that mimics getting meta-data for the menus from a web service or database
    DynamicMenuService service = new DynamicMenuService();
    VoiceMenu myMenu = service.GetMenu("myMenu");
    Prompt menuOptions = new Prompt();
    //Build the prompts for the menu options form the meta-data
    foreach (MenuOption option in myMenu.Options)
        menuOptions.audios.Add(new TtsMessage(option.PromptMsg + service.GetSelectionPrompt(option.Number)));
    //Create the initial state and view model without any transitions
    State myMenuState = ViewStateBuilder.Build("myMenu", new Ask("myMenu", menuOptions,
        new Grammar(new BuiltinGrammar(BuiltinGrammar.GrammarType.digits, 1, 1))));
    //Add the transitions to the state
    foreach (MenuOption option in myMenu.Options)
        myMenuState.AddTransition("continue", option.TransitionTarget, new Condition("result == '" + option.Number.ToString() + "'"));
    //Add the state to the call flow
    flow.AddState(myMenuState);
    flow.AddState(ViewStateBuilder.Build("doThis", new Exit("doThis", "You selected to do this. Goodbye.")));
    flow.AddState(ViewStateBuilder.Build("doThat", new Exit("doThat", "You selected to do that. Goodbye.")));
    flow.AddState(ViewStateBuilder.Build("doWhatever", new Exit("doWhatever", "You selected to do whatever. Goodbye.")));
    flow.AddState(ViewStateBuilder.Build("invalidSelect", new Exit("invalidSelect", "That was an invalid selection. Goodbye.")));
    return flow;
}
The comments in the code provide the step by step process on how to create the prompt for your dynamic menu and how to create the transitions in the call flow based on the caller's input.  There is a mock service in this example that simulates getting the meta-data that represents the menu structure to use for the voice application.  In a real-world application you would substitute this mock service with a web service or database access through a repository.  This new example demonstrates the flexibility of VoiceModel when creating a voice application.

If you run into an issue with VoiceModel in a particular context that you would like to use it in just create a new issue in the VoiceModel project  and we will either provide a solution for using VoiceModel in that context or it may turn into a new feature request.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Claims in ASP.NET Identity

Claims can simplify and increase the performance of authentication and authorization processes. I wrote about how you can use the roles stored as claims to eliminate back-end queries every time authorization takes place .  ASP.NET Identity has good support for claims-based identity and it creates several claims for you automatically when you create a new identity.  Here is how we create the identity for a new user during the log-in process UserManager<applicationuser> userManager = new UserManager<applicationuser>(new UserStore<applicationuser>(new SecurityContext())); ClaimsIdentity identity = userManager.CreateIdentity(user, DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie); If you inspect the Claims property of ClaimsIdentity after calling CreateIdentity you will see that there are there are three or more claims. There is a claim for the user ID, user name, identity provider and one for each role assigned. So what if you want to add some more claims? Here...
Keep reading

Customizing Claims for Authorization in ASP.NET Core 2.0

Image
There have been some major changes to ASP.NET Identity with the release of Core 2.0, which you can read about here .  One of the major changes is that it does not rely on using middleware anymore to customize it.  Instead dependency injection is used by configuring via services in the ConfigureServices method of StartUp.cs .   There is not much documentation or examples on how to do this so I am going to explore how to customize ASP.NET Identity and publish some examples in this blog.  First I wanted to look at how you would add custom claims to the identity and then use those claims for authorization. To begin create a new ASP.NET Core Web Application  project in Visual Studio 2017.  Be sure to select . NET Core and ASP.NET Core 2.0 in the two drop downs at the top.  Select the template for Web Application (Model-View-Controller) and Change the Authentication to Individual User Accounts .  When the project is created you are ready to add so...
Keep reading

Seeding & Customizing ASP.NET MVC SimpleMembership

Image
In ASP.NET MVC 4 Microsoft introduced a new membership provider that is referred to as SimpleMembership.  SimpleMembership makes it easier to customize user profiles and incorporates  OAuth support.  I have seen a lot of questions on StackOverflow on how to customize SimpleMembership and seed it with data and in this post I will discuss some methods for achieving both . SimpleMembership uses Entity Framework (EF) 5 and the code-first model. To initialize the database that contains the users and roles a filter is used called  InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.   This attribute is decorated on the AccountController as shown here: [Authorize] [InitializeSimpleMembership] public class AccountController : Controller { ... } This is setup this way so that the initialization code is only called when accessing the actions on the AccountController .  If you look at the code for  InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute you will see a lot of cod...
Keep reading