How to Add Variety to Your Alexa Skill’s Responses

When building voice experiences, variety is key. People may not mind scanning the same webpage times over, but no one wants to have the same conversation again and again.

Build variety into your skill’s responses to offer a conversational experience and keep customers engaged over time. For example, think of all the ways that you can say, “OK.” You might say, “Got it,” “Great,” “Sounds good,” and so on.

You can vary your responses by creating a list of phrases and using a random number generator to pick something from that list. This approach will add varety to your skill’s interactions and make your responses less robotic. To get started, use the following function:

function randomPhrase(phraseList) {
     let i = Math.floor(Math.random() * phraseList.length);
     return(phraseList[i]);
}

Javascript is a pass-by-reference for non-primitives so it's not going to make a fresh copy and consume a ton of memory. If you want to vary your welcome message, paste the following into your code:

const welcomeText = 'welcome to Bitcoin exchange I can check the price of Bitcoin';

const welcomeQuestion = 'Do you want me to check the current price of Bitcoin?';

const welcomePrompts = [
     "Hello",
     "Howdy", 
     "Hi",
     "Good Day"
];

Then call randomPhrase() from your welcome intent or LaunchRequest.

'LaunchRequest': function() {
      this.response.speak(`${randomPhrase(welcomePrompts)}, ${welcomeText} ${welcomeQuestion}`)
          .listen(welcomeQuestion);
      this.emit(':responseReady');
}

We are using ES6 Template Literals to stitch together our randomly selected greeting, welcome text, and question.

The cool thing about this approach is that it can be used anywhere to vary the response. For example, you can use it to vary single words or entire phrases. If you take the time to carefully plan out all of your possible responses and how to mix them, you could randomly combine parts of sentences into complete coherent sentences for maximum effect.

For a more in-depth look, check out the quiz game template. The right and wrong answer responses have been randomized. My favorite is the one that tricks the user into thinking they had the wrong answer when they were in fact correct.

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Source: Alexa Developer Blog