An answer capsule exists because of how retrieval works. An assistant answering a question pulls passages rather than whole pages, so the unit that gets cited is a paragraph. If the answer to your page's title question is buried under two thousand words, the passage that gets pulled may not be the one you would have chosen.
A good capsule is one paragraph, answers the question in the first sentence, and makes sense with no surrounding context. It should not contain a pronoun referring to something above it, because it will be read alone.
Marking it with a data attribute and pointing SpeakableSpecification at that selector tells a machine which paragraph you intend as the answer. The markup does not create the value; the self-contained paragraph does. The markup just removes the guesswork.
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Frequently asked
Where should an answer capsule go on the page?
Directly after the opening paragraph, before the first section heading. High enough that a reader in a hurry finds it, and early enough that retrieval favours it, without displacing the introduction that gives the page a voice.
Should the capsule repeat text from the FAQ?
Using the same text is better than writing a second version. Two summaries of one page drift apart over time and eventually contradict each other, which is worse for a reader and for a machine than a little duplication.
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