When the customer is ready to move forward, the prototype can serve as the basis for building the production system. The dialog design phase focuses on the creation of a detailed dialog design specification document. Together, the persona design, audio environment and dialog specification becomes the basis for the development and testing of the application. The grammar must cover, to the extent possible, all the words and phrases users will use to converse with the system. Nuance offers many pre-developed grammars to build a specific grammar for a customer's application.
Nuance follows a six-step grammar testing process to ensure the quality of the resulting product.
This process is designed to find bugs, assure coverage of expected caller responses, resolve ambiguities in the grammar, and identify and fix problems with word pronunciation models. Application Development Support Nuance works closely with the application developer writing the application-level code and host interfaces to support the development and integration of Nuance software and APIs into the application. Nuance is also available to answer any questions about the dialog specification and remains actively involved in unit and integration testing. Application and Usability Testing Prior to deployment of a pilot, Nuance completes application tests designed to verify the readiness of the system with respect to speech recognition issues. These tests are normally performed after completion of unit testing and integration testing.