The first way to derail the simplicity of a question is to exhibit fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) over mixed-initiative (MI) answers to questions. Let's start with a simple prompt:

Are you a member of this club?

It's a simple yes-no question, and one would expect the user to provide a simple yes or no in reply. And of course they do, usually in very large numbers. But then the log files expose the outliers and we start fretting when we hear tuning data that includes these recorded user replies:

"I'm not a member, but my father is, and he asked me to call."

"Yes, I joined yesterday, but you may not have it on record yet."

"No, but I want to join."

These mixed-initiative responses are usually easy to reject as out-of-grammar (OOG), but occasionally cause false acceptance problems. Even if not, rejection is often perceived by the user as false rejection, and stakeholders start fretting over AHT, naturalness, customer experience fears, and similar FUD.

Here are a couple of facts to hold in mind when fretting:

• Almost all MI user replies are in response to yes-no questions
• Learn to anticipate MI whenever you design a yes-no question
• Establish a good solid policy for consistently handling MI

If you can think generically about MI, you will be able to anticipate, prevent, handle, spot, and smooth over MI circumstances according to your automation strategy.