Conversational User Interfaces: Next-Gen Digital Interaction

The capabilities of your UI need to meet the needs of the conversation you’re trying to support. In my first article for the Crafting Conversations Series, I promised to break down the components of well-designed conversations, how to get started, and best practices. Now, I’m going to share how to start designing a conversation UI, including my thought process, advice, and tips. Most of us are comfortable using the GUIs we navigate on a regular basis, and that’s no accident. Conversational interfaces have created the expectation of immediacy for all of us. We want to order food at the drop of a hat, find tickets to concerts and book flights in a snap, and see if our friends are up for a camping trip this weekend within the hour.

If the user then asks "Who is the president?", the search will carry forward the context of the United States and provide the appropriate response. A conversational user interface (CUI) allows people to interact with software, apps, and bots like how they interact Chat PG with real people. Using natural language in typing or speaking, they can accomplish certain tasks with ease. Overall, conversational AI apps have been able to replicate human conversational experiences well, leading to higher rates of customer satisfaction.

Beyond the GUI: It's Time for a Conversational User Interface

The game designers don't have one flow in mind but allow for a natural, organic flow dependent on what the user needs or wants at that moment. This traditional model of using a purchase funnel to direct online users tries to force the user through a pre-designed flow or funnel, by giving them only one option to select. We’ve grown accustomed to this flow, as consumers, but that doesn’t mean it is the best way to approach digital consumer interaction. Our user guide provides detailed insights into navigating and utilizing the interface to enhance your design workflow. In the announcement for the event, the organizers said that conversational design is about getting the right information at the right time to the user. In fact, the technology is now one of the most powerful transformation agents around today.

We’d rather not learn the layout of a new app or tap through unfamiliar icons just to find what we’re looking for. Conversational AI is also very scalable as adding infrastructure to support conversational AI is cheaper and faster than the hiring and on-boarding process for new employees. This is especially helpful when products expand to new geographical markets or during unexpected short-term spikes in demand, such as during holiday seasons. To understand the entities that surround specific user intents, you can use the same information that was collected from tools or supporting teams to develop goals or intents. In other words, we can still benefit from the full awesomeness of the internet while spending far less time with it.

One user had the following exchanges with ChatGPT; they combined chiseling and exploring conversations. When the expanding conversations involved Bing, the expansions were usually selected from the suggested followup queries. In some of the conversations we studied, the bot did ask for clarification. For example, one participant started the conversation with Issue with swimming pool cleaner. ChatGPT asked for specific information about the cleaner and the issue, expediting the funneling process.

Try to reduce the number of cases when users have to provide phone numbers, street addresses, or alphanumeric passwords. It can be difficult for users to tell voice system strings of numbers or detailed information. Offer alternative methods for inputting this kind of information, conversation interface such as using the companion mobile app. When you design system responses, always take a cognitive load into account. VUI users aren’t reading, they are listening, and the longer you make system responses, the more information they have to retain in their working memory.

There’s an amusing irony to this, because 1986, 1996, 2006 were also the years of everything conversational. To learn where conversational UI should go in the future, we should draw from this rich history. It's an innovation that not only makes online shopping more engaging but also significantly more user-centric. Literally daily advances in GenAI, the prospect of making every online shopping experience a personalized adventure becomes increasingly attainable. Imagine landing on your favourite clothing website, and instead of the usual grid of apparel, you're greeted by a friendly chat interface. "Hey there, wanna see how our new summer styles might look on you? Just upload a photo of yourself right here and we'll show you, like right now!" it suggests.

Artificial intelligence and chatbots are having a major media moment. After the 2022 release of ChatGPT by Open AI, more people are benefiting from accessible and practical applications of AI. In interacting with tools like ChatGPT or customer service chatbots, they use conversational user interfaces. As NLP and generative AI advance, conversational interfaces are becoming more capable. With better comprehension of preferences, context, and sentiment, they can handle increasingly complex interactions.

So, let's talk about what UI Designers can learn from conversational user interfaces such as voice assistants, automated messaging platforms, and video games. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) refers to technologies, such as chatbots or virtual agents, that users can talk to. They use large volumes of data, machine learning and natural language processing to help imitate human interactions, recognizing speech and text inputs and translating their meanings across various languages. Staffing a customer service department can be quite costly, especially as you seek to answer questions outside regular office hours. Providing customer assistance via conversational interfaces can reduce business costs around salaries and training, especially for small- or medium-sized companies.

With access to vast datasets, machine learning models can discern usage patterns and preemptively surface relevant information. Conversational interfaces for health purposes are still in their infancy but have taken off during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, what are the other functions of conversational interfaces that UI designers can utilize? Once you know your users and how you want to engage with them (through which interface style), you can begin designing full conversations. Knowing the context of conversations is what will enable you to design great experiences for your CUI.

A very creative use of the text medium, but still fundamentally text. Messaging apps are taking over the world and app store rankings with incredible retention and engagement rates. Every community, marketplace, on-demand service, dating app, social game or e-commerce product has or will soon have messaging as part of the experience to drive retention, engagement and transaction volume. These technologies are inching closer to making machines understand not just the words, but the intent and emotion behind them. For instance, sentiment analysis is making strides in deciphering the emotional undertones in user inputs, which is a step towards more empathetic and human-like interactions.

We see conversational user interfaces becoming the norm across all digital platforms, spanning from app and software solutions to purpose-built web portals. A conversational UI also makes these digital tasks as intuitive as having an interaction with another human, even though the experience is fully self-serve. In exploring conversations, users can be supported with suggested followup prompts that naturally build upon the information presented in the bot’s answer. You might have noticed that some of the examples above include messages that are not necessairly composed or sent by humans. In fact as messages become mini applications it makes more and more sense to include bots in the conversation. Having mini applications in each message is especially convenient in conversational commerce and applications that drive workflows.

How AI is Transforming User Interfaces - The Conversation

You need to ensure that font size and the size of imagery and UI elements that you will show on the screen are comfortable for users. Ideally, you should observe users who use your product for the first time. Testing with 5 participants will help you reveal most of your usability issues. Whether users are using the system in a noisy area or they’re just having issues understanding the question, they should be able to ask the system to repeat the last prompt at any time. When people don’t hear/see any feedback from the system they might think that it’s not working.

For instance, you can ask your voice assistant about the weather, or you can talk to a conversational interface chatbot to find out the price of a company’s product. A voice user interface allows a user to complete an action by speaking a command. Introduced in October 2011, Apple's Siri was one of the first voice assistants widely adopted. Siri allowed users of iPhone to get information and complete actions on their device simply by asking Siri. In the later years, Siri was integrated with Apple's HomePod devices.

In these cases, customers should be given the opportunity to connect with a human representative of the company. Since Conversational AI is dependent on collecting data to answer user queries, it is also vulnerable to privacy and security breaches. Developing conversational AI apps with high  privacy and security standards and monitoring systems will help to build trust among end users, ultimately increasing chatbot usage over time. While short keyword phrases like Rosie Odonnell might work well for search, they lack enough context to help AI chatbots understand what the user is asking for. Sometimes users realized that a search engine would be better suited for such queries and quit the bot. In what follows, we discuss each of these 6 types of conversations; for each, we provide tips for both users and interface designers of generative AI chatbots.

Bot responses can also be manually crafted to help the bot achieve specific tasks. They can also be programmed to work with other business systems, like ecommerce and CRM platforms, to surface information or perform tasks that otherwise wouldn’t need a human to intervene. Chatbots are a commonly used form of conversational UI in customer service. Bots are deployed to save time for agents by handling repetitive questions or deflecting customers to self-service channels.

It's often said design is a dialogue between designer and user. We talk to users about what they want and need. We…

Chatsimple offers innovative conversational interface as a service to streamline how you communicate with your customers. One of the most significant challenges is enabling accurate natural language understanding. It means that the CUI needs to understand the user's intent and correctly interpret their commands, no matter how they are phrased or what words they use.

For certain types of conversations like funneling and pinpointing, the length indicates how well-articulated the initial prompt was. Short pinpointing chats begin with detailed prompts that already lay out all the requirements for an acceptable answer. In both such conversations, the user’s information need is constrained and fairly narrow — they need a specific piece of information or a specific output. An exploring conversation often feels like a conversation with a real teacher; the user acts as a student learning by acquiring depth into a topic and asking questions as they learn. The user is building queries based on the information received from the bot.

You need to understand where and how the voice-enabled product will be used. The context of use will impact many product design decisions you will make. It’s important to use everyday language and invite users to say things in the ways they usually do. If you notice that you have to explain commands, it’s a clear indication that something is wrong with your design and you need to go back to the drawing board and redesign it. Meet Adam Silver’s Form Design Patterns, a practical guide to designing and building forms for the web.

Both users and designers need to consider what the best tool is for a given information need. Sometimes, it could be that an AI chatbot won’t do a job as good as a search engine. Imagine landing on a webpage, and instead of static text, you're greeted by a conversational interface inviting you to engage in a dialogue. The screen space, now dominated, or sizeable section, by this interface, becomes a gateway to a more personalized and engaging user experience. Conversational interfaces essentially transform static conversion funnels into dynamic journeys tailored to each user in real-time.

The static elements of design give way to dynamic, real-time interactions. Designers need to envision how the conversation will unfold, anticipate user queries, and design responses that are informative yet engaging. This dynamic nature demands a more holistic design approach, ensuring that the conversational interface remains coherent regardless of the direction the dialogue takes. Generative visuals tailored to individual users in real time have immense power to engage and persuade.

This generation of VUIs is available in various types of products — from mobile phones to car human-machine interfaces (HMIs). Chatbots are also starting to be used in many countries for telehealth purposes. This application of health behavioral user experiences is perhaps the most groundbreaking use of conversational interfaces, in my opinion. You can ask AI-powered bots simple questions and even add a follow-up question, and their natural language processing will take over and respond with on-brand messaging and prompts to help you take action. These smart interfaces have made talking to machines more natural and engaging. Instead of clicking buttons and browsing web pages, you can simply speak or type your requests.

Machine Learning (ML) is a sub-field of artificial intelligence, made up of a set of algorithms, features, and data sets that continuously improve themselves with experience. As the input grows, the AI platform machine gets better at recognizing patterns and uses it to make predictions. The end goal is to shift the burden of retrieving and distilling relevant information from humans to AIs. And by embedding this conversational capability into the spaces we live and work — our kitchens, cars, and offices — we can reduce the amount of time we spend peering into phones and laptops.

• Eventually, over-the-top providers like Nexmo and many others made it easy for any developer to build applications taking advantage of SMS as a global platform.
• Customers can begin a conversation on the web with a chatbot before being handed off to a human, who has visibility into previous interactions and the customer’s profile.
• Natural language processing is the current method of analyzing language with the help of machine learning used in conversational AI.

It’s no surprise that the conversational AI market, valued at USD 9.9 https://chat.openai.com/ billion in 2023, is expected to reach USD 57.2 billion by 2032.

There's a learning curve involved as designers delve into the nuances of conversational UI/UX design. They need to acquaint themselves with the lexicon of conversational design, understand the principles of human conversation, and learn how to translate these principles into digital interactions. UI/UX design will be undergoing a profound transformation with the advent of conversational interfaces. The traditional design ethos, rooted in visual aesthetics and user-friendly navigation, is now intertwining with the dynamics of interactive dialogues. As websites and applications evolve to encompass more conversational elements, the role of designers too is expanding, bringing with it a suite of new challenges and opportunities.

This is a stark contrast to traditional state-based chatbots that are more rigid and less adept at handling complex or unexpected queries. Platforms such as Chatsimple leverage the power of ChatGPT, offering chatbots that deliver customer interactions almost indistinguishable from human conversations, thus enhancing the overall user experience. As AI technology continues to improve, the boundaries between AI and human interactions are becoming increasingly blurred, signalling a significant shift in customer service delivery. Examples of conversational interfaces you might be familiar with are chatbots in customer service, which work to respond to queries and deflect easy questions from live agents. You might also use voice assistants in your everyday life—like a smart speaker, or your TV’s remote control.

Through analyzing 425 interactions with generative-AI bots like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard, we've discovered that conversations could involve many vague, underspecified prompts or few, razor-sharp ones. First, different conversation types serve distinct information needs and demand varied UI designs. Second, there is no one optimal conversation length — both short and long conversations can be helpful, as they might support different user goals.

Due to the tech limitations, the system could only recognize the spoken numbers of “0” through “9”. Since the user is presented with a lot of options at once, they are given the power to select the right time to take action. Brawl Stars, for those who don't know the game, is an online multiplayer battle-royal style game.

While search engines perform best with keywords, AI bots need more context to understand what kind of response or output you’re looking for. Despite that, most of these bots are text-based as application environments, and don’t allow richer mini apps as part of the messaging experience yet. Still very much a command line-like experience, with the addition of some rich content.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Through chat, anyone could converse with advanced AI as they would another person. The next generation of computers will give users a unique opportunity to interact with voice. It’s up to designers to develop systems that will be natural for users. Let’s explore the idea of video games as a conversational interface by talking about each element of the game’s home screen visual interface. Simply put, CUIs are intuitive digital experiences, powered by artificial intelligence, that allow humans to interact with computers more naturally by using spoken or written language. Talking to devices has become routine nowadays, thanks to conversational interfaces.

Chatbots and virtual assistants can respond instantly, providing 24-hour availability to potential customers. The chief benefit of conversational interfaces in customer service is that they help create immersive, seamless experiences. Customers can begin a conversation on the web with a chatbot before being handed off to a human, who has visibility into previous interactions and the customer’s profile. Conversations from any channel can be managed in the same agent workspace. A conversational user interface (CUI) is a digital user interface that uses technology to simulate an organic conversation with a real human. In the past, computers have based this conversational element on both text-based user interfaces and graphical interfaces to translate the user's action into commands or key terms the computer can understand.

However, the biggest challenge for conversational AI is the human factor in language input. Emotions, tone, and sarcasm make it difficult for conversational AI to interpret the intended user meaning and respond appropriately. Language input can be a pain point for conversational AI, whether the input is text or voice. Dialects, accents, and background noises can impact the AI’s understanding of the raw input. Slang and unscripted language can also generate problems with processing the input.

Conversation: The age-old interface

Conversations in which intent is inferred and answers to questions are summarized and personalized. Bots should attempt to use the length and the structure of the user’s prompt, as well as the complexity of the answer to determine the conversation type early in the exchange and adjust behavior accordingly. That is because different conversation types address different information needs and the support provided by the bot needs to be tailored to each need.

Participants logged a total of 425 conversations and rated each for helpfulness and trustworthiness. At the end of the study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 14 participants. One of the big downsides of the command line approach was that you actually had to either know what to input or had to ask the computer for options. Remembering all these commands was a bit too much to ask from most people, and it made using a computer less accessible.

For instance, sentiment analysis is beginning to evaluate the emotional undertones in user input, allowing for more natural, human-like exchanges. Eventually, intelligent assistants may manage workflows by delegating tasks across applications based on context and user priorities. Voice is a powerful tool that we can use to communicate with each other. Human conversations inspire product designers to create voice user interfaces (VUI), a next-generation of user interfaces that gives users the power to interact with machines using their natural language. New software has also been developed to enable telehealth chatbots that are HIPPA compliant and completely confidential. User conversation interfaces have many different practical applications.

And they need the opportunity to take action based on that information. If I deconstruct any good interface, the main components that are always there are information and action. It speaks over 175 languages, integrates seamlessly with platforms like WhatsApp and Gmail, and can be trained within 6 minutes – no coding required. Since the dawn of humanity, communication has been central to our existence. It’s how we share ideas, build relationships, and work together as a team.

That’s because CUIs refine and enhance user experiences, bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Llama 2 and ChatGPT are two prominent AI models developed by Meta and OpenAI respectively. Llama 2, open-sourced and free for both research and commercial use, is designed to be trained on custom datasets and has been trained on 2 trillion tokens. It claims to outperform other models in reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests. On the other hand, ChatGPT, powered by the GPT-4 model, is renowned for generating coherent and diverse texts on almost any topic, but it is not open-source and requires a subscription fee. The competition between these two models is expected to drive further innovation in the AI field.

The fluid interplay between designer intent and user direction requires carefully plotting conversion branch points within the conversational flows. With each phrase exchange, designers must keep conversion goals in perspective, leveraging conversational context to nudge users closer. Well-designed conversations feel natural while purposefully steering towards target actions. Having a conversational interface that understands and responds in a human-like manner can instill a sense of trust and ease among users.

Feature discoverability can be a massive problem in voice-based interfaces. In GUI, you have a screen that you can use to showcase new features, while in voice user interfaces, you don’t have this option. Even when a VUI device has a screen, we should always design for voice-first interactions. While the screen can complement the voice interaction, the user should be able to complete the operation with minimum or no look at the screen. These kinds of interactions differ from the vast majority of chat assistant conversations that happen in the chat window of a corporate website such as Facebook.

Intelligent conversational interfaces use machine learning models to constantly learn and improve. That means your conversations with them will only get more natural over time. To get started with your own conversational interfaces for customer service, check out our resources on building bots from scratch below.