One of the problems that arises with alpha ordinals is that some English letters sound like other words. So for example, pronouncing "C" sounds like "see" or "sea". The letter "B" sounds like "bee" or "be". These are called homophones.

If your user is using a voice assistant to dictate their responses to your bot, it's likely the voice assistant will substitute one of these homophones for the actual letter and your bot would fail to match the user's message.

This is where homophone detection helps.

Example

Given this code snippet from the Alpha Ordinal Matcher docs:

def get_response
  handle_message(
    'Red' => proc { current_user.update_attributes!(favorite_color: 'red') },
    'Blue' => proc { current_user.update_attributes!(favorite_color: 'blue') },
    'Green' => proc { current_user.update_attributes!(favorite_color: 'green') },
    'Yellow' => proc { current_user.update_attributes!(favorite_color: 'yellow') }
  )
end

If a user enters the letter "b", then the "Blue" match arm will automatically be selected as expected. However, Xip will also natively accept the input "be" and "bee" from the user and the "Blue" match arm will still be selected. Similarly, "see" and "sea" will select the "Green" match arm.