Requests and Responses

Learn more about the general architecture and lifecycle of voice app requests and responses.

• Introduction to Voice Interactions
  • Request
  • Logic
  • Response
• Sessions

Introduction to Voice Interactions

The request and response lifecycle of a voice application has two key concepts:

• Session
• Interaction

Each interaction between a user and a voice application consists of an interaction pair with a request and a response.

Request

The request is the incoming data that the voice platform sends to your app's endpoint. It consists of information like:

• User ID,
• Intent, e.g. MyNameIsIntent
• Input, e.g. name
• Session data, e.g. a state

and other things that might be relevant to your app. You can access the incoming request with this.$request.

Find everything about the $request object here.

Logic

The app logic is what happens between an incoming request and sending back a response to the voice platform.

Usually, this includes:

• Routing through intents, states, and variable user input
• Data input and storage
• Other things like business logic and API calls

A great next step to learn more about the Jovo app logic is taking a look at Routing.

Response

The response is what you send back to the platform after the request has been run through your app logic. It includes

• Speech output (text or audio URL)
• Visual output to display on screens
• Session data

Find more information on Output here.

You can access the incoming request with this.$response.

Find everything about the $response object here.

Sessions

A session is an uninterrupted interaction between a user and your application. It consists of at least one request and response interaction pair, but can have a series of inputs and outputs. A session can end for the following reasons:

• The response includes shouldEndSession, which is true for tell and endSession method calls
• A user doesn't respond to an ask prompt and the session times out
• The user asks to end the session by saying "quit" or "exit"

Learn more about how to use data across sessions here.