Summary

This chapter has shown how to implement form-filling dialogs in which the app engages in simple conversations with the user in order to retrieve several pieces of data which can later be used to provide advanced functionalities to the user through web services or mashups.

The FormFillLib contains the classes to retrieve and parse an XML definition of the dialog structure into Java objects. These objects are employed to control the oral interaction with the user. This library makes it possible to easily build any form-filling dialog in an Android app by specifying its structure in a simplified VoiceXML file accessible on the Internet.

The MusicBrain app shows how to use the library to gather information from the user through a spoken conversation to query a web service. In this case, the app asks the user for a word and two dates which are used to query the MusicBrainZ open music encyclopedia for albums with the word in their title and those released between the specified dates. The...