Error Handling

Inevitably, the user will say something that your skill can’t handle. It’s best not to think of these as errors on the part of the user, remember there aren’t really errors in conversations. Conversations are naturally cooperative with both parties seeking to continue to a successful outcome. Keeping that in mind you should do your best to avoid Error Handling that is a dead-end.

Avoid

Speaker
User	Timer
Neon	I'm sorry I can't help you with that

Better

Speaker
User	Timer
Neon	A timer for how long?
User	5 minutes

In the first example Neon does not give the user any options to finish the job they set out to do. Try to avoid situations where the user has to start the conversation over.

Help, Cancel, and Stop

When designing your skill it's best to think about the universal utterances, help, cancel and stop. At any point while interacting with the user should be able to say “help” to get assistance using the skill. Even if the help is quite simple. Ideally the user's interactions with your skill will go perfectly, but in reality, they should have the ability to "cancel" the skill's activity if something is not going the way they expected. Finally, "stop" can function in a similar way to "cancel," or in the context of a media skill it may have different meaning. Consider if your skill will have different functionality for "cancel" and for "stop."

Neon defines built-in utterances for "cancel" and "stop," but does not currently implement a "help" utterance. Consider adding your own!