As we have been increasing usage of Violet, we have wanted to provide help for more complex Voice Apps to be built. These have primarily been about more robust support for controllers (along with automatically initializing them) and supporting multiple Conversation Flow Language scripts in a Voice App.
read moreOne of the strengths of using the Conversational Flow Language is the ease with which teams can nest flows. As we have been using this capability we have noticed a few edge cases that we wanted to add support for - especially in supporting intent reuse through the conversational scripts. This release has improvements to support these.
read moreViolet has always had a single focus - to become a developer framework which eases building great Voice User Experiences. Just like with the Web and Mobile, we believe in the importance of Voice User Interfaces. Two years ago when we started building Voice Apps, we found that drag-and-drop tools are limited when needing to build sophisticated use-cases, and that other voice development frameworks make refining UX hard.
read moreOne of the bigger challenges in building Voice Apps is to do with testing them (by talking to the apps). In this release we made it easier to test your app locally by including a button in the local development tooling to start voice testing.
read moreWith this release we hooked in the platform specific Launch Requests into CFL, i.e. when using the id launch.
In this release there was a focus for the usage of CFL in templates. An example can be seen in lib/violetList.js.
This release adds support for SSML to be provided inside of CFL tags (specifically <say>) and consists of ongoing refinement of the implementation of the Conversational Flow Language.
With the previous release you could deploy an app to Amazon Alexa or Google Dialogflow, however, but not both. This release adds the capability to support both platform at the same time (at different endpoints) and matures the features and provides numerous bug fixes.
read moreThis release builds on the previous one, by improving support for Google Dialogflow. On top of this, it adds support for a higher level Conversational Flow Language to ease Voice App development, and provides hooks to integrate it with application logic.
read moreWe are huge fans of Amazon’s Echo Devices, but have had multiple reasons to go beyond. From supporting Voice-Enabled Mobile Apps and Web Sites to supporting Google’s Home Devices, we needed to support another Voice Platform. With this release Violet provides that support via Dialogflow.
read moreThis release includes bug fixes and a minor set of user-contributed feedback. In particular, it allows users to customize launch phrases and close requests.
read moreWe focused on the core of Violet - the Conversation Engine in this release. As we have been using Violet we had collected a number of scenarios where it was hard to do the things that would be common in Conversations. In this release we therefore did a fairly significant refactor and clean-up of the engine and polished some of the rough edges.
read moreThis has been a fun release. As we have gotten feedback from a lot of people, we have spent the time better understanding what our focus for Violet is, iterating/refining features, and maturing the code. While doing all that there was so much in flux internally that we decided to skip the v0.6 release.
read moreThis week has been a busy week for us. We got the final go ahead for open sourcing Violet and answered a lot of questions about it at Dreamforce. The feedback has been incredible and we are looking forward to seeing what people build from here.
read moreIn our quest towards enabling others to build great Voice experiences a key goal of ours is to share our work. We therefore would like to get Violet to be used by more than just our team and today we have made the first release of Violet.
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