Chatbots Should Be An Abstraction Of Human Conversation
When creating or rather crafting a chatbot conversation we as designers must draw inspiration and guidance from real-world conversations.
Elements of human conversation should be identified and abstractedto be incorporated in our chatbot conversation.
General rules and concepts of human conversations must be derived and implemented via technically astute means.
Below I list 10 elementsof human conversation which can be incorporated in a Conversational AI interface. Conversational designers want users to speak to their chatbot as to a human…hence it is time for the chatbot to converse more human like.
Christoph Niemannhas fascinating ideas on abstraction and when visual design becomes too abstract.
Digression is a common and natural part of most conversations…
The speaker introduces a topic, subsequently the speaker introduces a second topic, another story that seems to be unrelated.
And then return to the original topic.
Digression can also be explained in the following way… when an user is in the middle of a dialog, also referred to customer journey, Topic or user story.
And, it is designed to achieve a single goal, but the user decides to abruptly switch the topic to initiate a dialog flow that is designed to address a different goal.
Hence the user wants to jump midstream from one journey or story to another.
This is usually not possible within a Chatbot, and once a user has committed to a journey or topic, they have to see it through. Normally the dialog does not support this ability for a user to change subjects.
Often an attempt to digress by the user ends in an “I am sorry” from the chatbot and breaks the current journey.
Hence the chatbot framework you are using, should allow for digression. Where users pop out and back into a conversation.
The easy approach is to structure the conversation very rigid from the chatbot’s perspective. And funnel the user in and out of the conversational interface, this might even present very favorably in reporting. But the user experience is appalling.
Overly structuring the conversation breaks the beauty of a conversational interface. Unstructured conversational interfaces is hard to craft but makes for an exceptional user experience.
One of the reasons is that user’s are so use to having to structure their input, that they want to enjoy and exercise the freedom of speech (spoken or text), which can lead to disappointment if the expectation of freedom is not met.
By now we all know that the prime aim of a chatbot is to act as a conversational interface, simulating the conversations we have as humans…
Unfortunately you will find that many of the basic elements of human conversation are not introduced to most chatbots.
A good example of this as we have seen is digression …and another is disambiguation. Often throughout a conversation we as humans will invariably and intuitively detect ambiguity.
Ambiguity is when we hear something which is said, which is open for more than one interpretation. Instead of just going off on a tangent which is not intended by the utterance, I perform the act of disambiguation; by asking a follow-up question.
This is simply put, removing ambiguity from a statement or dialog.
Ambiguity makes sentences confusing. For example, “I saw my friend John with binoculars”. This this mean John was carrying a pair of binoculars? Or, I could only see John by using a pair of binoculars?
Hence, I need to perform disambiguation, and ask for clarification. A chatbot encounters the same issue, where the user’s utterance is ambiguous and instead of the chatbot going off on one assumed intent, it could ask the user to clarify their input. The chatbot can present a few options based on a certain context; this can be used by the user to select and confirm the most appropriate option.
