Generally whenever there was a long query asked from SUSI through speech, it would respond to the user with a speech output, similarly the output is given through speech whenever the user clicks on the “Try it” button on the skill details activity.

The long answers for e.g. asking SUSI “How to cook biryani ?” gives a very long response which when conveyed through the speech output takes a long amount of time. Also most of the time users don’t want to listen to such long answers, but at the same time there is no option or feature to stop SUSI. The user either needs to switch over to another activity or has to close the app.

So, to solve this problem such that neither the user has to shut down the app nor the user has to switch over to another activity, the “STOP” action was added in SUSI.

The “STOP” action was integrated in the server and is of following type :

 

“actions”: [{“type”: “stop”}],

How to define STOP response ?

To integrate this action type in the app, a separate response type was added and checked for. In the file ParseSusiResponseHandler.kt the action type stop was added as :

Constant.STOP -> try {   stop = susiResponse.answers[0].actions[1].type } catch (e: Exception) { }

So, now whenever the query of type “stop” was entered by the user it would be caught by this block and further processing could be done. The stop variable takes the value from the JSON response fetched and the value extracted is the one stored against the type key in the second field of the actions JSON in the first field of the answers JSON.

What to be done when executing STOP?

After the STOP action was caught the task to do was to define the behaviour of the app when this response was caught. So, first thing that should happen when STOP is received is that the TextToSpeech Engine should close so that SUSI no longer can speak the sentence but defining top is more than just closing the TTS engine. STOP signifies that any activity that is being continued right now should be stopped.

So, Using the android lifecycle methods I added a function in the IChatView interface to define what actions should take place in the stopping process.

override fun stopMic() {   onPause()   registerReceiver(networkStateReceiver, IntentFilter(ConnectivityManager.CONNECTIVITY_ACTION))   window.setSoftInputMode(           WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_HIDDEN   )   if (recordingThread != null)       chatPresenter.startHotwordDetection()   if (etMessage.text.toString().isNotEmpty()) {       btnSpeak.setImageResource(R.drawable.ic_send_fab)       etMessage.setText(“”)       chatPresenter.micCheck(false)   }   chatPresenter.checkPreferences() }

The above function sends the activity to the onPause() lifecycle method to put the activity in a pausing state so that all that is taking place right now in the activity stops and this definitely serves our purpose. But after pausing the activity, there was a further need to perform some functionality that had to done on the start of the activity and therefore the code for that was also added in this function.

How to catch STOP?

The below code was added in ChatPresenter.kt file in which if the actionType from the psh object of type ParseSusiResponseHelper is “STOP” then the view function stopMic() is called which was defined above.

val psh = ParseSusiResponseHelper() psh.parseSusiResponse(susiResponse, i, utilModel.getString(R.string.error_occurred_try_again)) var setMessage = psh.answer if (psh.actionType == Constant.ANSWER && (PrefManager.checkSpeechOutputPref() && check || PrefManager.checkSpeechAlwaysPref())) {   setMessage = psh.answer   var speechReply = setMessage   if (psh.isHavingLink) {       speechReply = setMessage.substring(0, setMessage.indexOf(“http”))   }   chatView?.voiceReply(speechReply, susiResponse.answers[0].actions[i].language) } else if (psh.actionType == Constant.STOP) {   setMessage = psh.stop   chatView?.stopMic() }

Final Output

References

1. Stop  json response from susi server : https://api.susi.ai/susi/chat.json?timezoneOffset=-330&q=susi+stop
2. Android life cycle methods – Google: https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/activity-lifecycle
3. Interaction between view and presenters : https://medium.com/@cervonefrancesco/model-view-presenter-android-guidelines-94970b430ddf