Best Practices for Authoring Sidekick Voice Guides

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  • Published on Jun 9, 2025
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As you author Guides for Sidekick Voice, think about how Sidekick will sound as it engages with the Customer throughout the workflow detailed in your Guide. The following best practices will help set Sidekick Voice up for success.

Tips for writing advice

Maintain standard advice limit

Adhere to the general best practice of using a maximum of 10 pieces of advice for each Sidekick configuration. In addition to these 10 items, we recommend including the following guidance for voice-specific Guides:

  • Instruct Sidekick to write responses as if reading from a teleprompter for a speech. Keep responses brief and clear.

  • Instruct Sidekick to exclude links, markdown, and special characters that are unsuitable for spoken output.

Tips for configuring Guides

Avoid extra questions. Use what you already know about the Customer

Sidekick Voice uses best-in-class noise isolation and transcription technology. However, things can still be mis-transcribed. Whenever you ask the Customer to speak out critical input on the phone, you risk mis-transcription. To minimize this risk, we recommend:

  • Enable lookup by phone number. Then, use the caller phone number to Track Orders, ask for follow-up, and other non-sensitive actions.

  • If you must use the Customer email, use the number the Customer is calling from to fetch the Customer Profile. Then, use the email in the Customer Profile to take Action. This allows Sidekick to take Action without asking for a spoken email, which improves success rate. Here’s a JSON block you can copy paste into a Action Adaptor to create an action that looks up the email in the Customer Profile associated with a caller number: 

    {
  "active": true,
  "id": "rS-8rxx7VuHVM9bUux6Yb",
  "name": "getCurrentProfileEmail",
  "description": "retrieve the main email associated with the current profile",
  "paramsSchema": {
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {},
    "required": []
  },
  "steps": [
    {
      "id": "ZiGpoFH6qb9eQ5Jtt8ehK",
      "type": "js",
      "name": "profileEmail",
      "code": "function getMainEmail(data) {\n    const emails = data.emails || [];\n    \n    if (emails.length === 0) {\n        return null;\n    }\n    \n    const mainEmail = emails.find(email => email.primary);\n    return mainEmail ? mainEmail.normalized.toString() : emails[0].normalized.toString();\n}\nlet email = null;\ntry {\n    if ($customerProfile) {\n        email = getMainEmail($customerProfile);\n    }\n} catch (e) {\n    email = \"\";\n}\nreturn {profileEmail: email};"
    }
  ],
  "settings": {
    "strictMode": false
  },
  "managedBy": {
    "type": "org"
  },
  "updatedAt": "2025-04-17T15:00:22.503Z"
}

Ask for numerical input over alphanumeric input and symbols

If there's no choice but to get verbal input from the Customer, try to ask for numerical input, like the Customer's ZIP code, phone number, or order number. With the current best-available AI-driven transcription models, these work much better than non-numerical inputs like email, address, or full name.

Give Sidekick only the data it needs

Giving Sidekick too much data can backfire, especially on Voice. For example, if your API response returns all of a Customer's orders for all time, reading out all of those orders on Voice will frustrate the Customer. Use Action Adapters to return lean results: only the 3 most recent orders, or shipments from the past 30 days, or active subscriptions.

  • Specify within the Action Adaptor to return only a distinct set of recent information (i.e. the 3 most recent orders or only data from the last 30 days).

  • Specify within the Guide to ignore specific data sets (i.e. disregard orders made more than one month ago).

Instruct Sidekick to reply to the Customer in paragraph format

Guide Sidekick to respond in a paragraph, "teleprompter-style" format. Give it a concrete example. Here are two situations where this may apply:

  • Situations where Sidekick Voice will provide the Customer with a long list of items.

    • Example guidance for this scenario:

      • Do not provide full details for every order. Do not include size information. Shorten product names for spoken output. Limit the list to the 3 most recent orders at most. Provide the list of orders specifically in this example format. Example: "I found these 3 orders: An order created on December 13th for a gray sweatshirt. An order created on January 9th for three white t-shirts. An order created on September 19th for blue pants. Let me know which order you would like to track!"

  • Situations where Sidekick Voice should exclude specific pieces of information.

    • Example guidance for this scenario:

      • Do not use HTML, markup or emojis. Do not include tracking numbers. Always pronounce the website address as "my company.com". Use this exact example format. Example: "Thanks, we found your order placed January 1. It hasn't shipped yet. You can get further order details on our website, Retalé."

Remove the Sidekick name within the Basics tile

We recommend leaving the “Sidekick name” field within Basics empty for Sidekick Voice Guides. Supplying Sidekick with a name or title can result in Sidekick “signing” its name at the end of Voice messages.

Learn more about general tips for configuring Basics.

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