Introduction to Conversational User Interface
The idea behind the Conversational Interface is to make communication between humans and computers easier & foster a personal connection between services and their users. Different big IT Companies like Google, Apple, Facebook & Amazon, see conversation as the future of development. Understanding Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) is essential to understand the future of technological development. Bots soon might get replaced with apps, enabling users to interact with their favorite digital services directly.
Conversational user interfaces are the user interfaces that help humans to interact with computers using Voice or text. Click to explore about, Principles of Conversational User Interfaces
What is Conversational User Interface?
Conversational User Interface (CUI) is an interface design that allows users to interact with either real humans or bots using text and voice/speech through the web, mobile and desktop applications like Amazon’s Alexa for speech, Facebook’s Messenger for the chatbot. Conversational interfaces (CUI) are platforms that give the privilege of interacting with the computer on human language and provide the opportunity for the user to communicate with the computer in their natural language just like talking to another human, rather than in a syntax specific commands or clicking icons.
Interactions with a different conversational interfaces like a chatbot or voice assistant like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant, to do the shopping or to interact with your smartphone to perform some task like call to friend, search product over a website, buy a ticker or order food and many more.
What is Rasa User Interface?
Rasa is an Open source machine learning AI framework for developers and product teams to build contextual AI assistants. Rasa is a Conversational AI framework, not tied to a pre-built model or use case. It’s customized according to use case and requirement. Rasa is not a rule-based framework, and no need to worry about putting data in someone else’s Cloud as in others like Dialog Flow, Microsoft LUIS or Amazon Lex. Rasa has two main components:
- Rasa NLU
- Rasa Core
NLU handles unstructured inputs and converts them into a structured form that a machine can understand and acts. NLU helps in Sentiment Analysis and Conversational searches, allows a line of questioning to continue, with the context carried throughout the conversation, while Core handles dialogues and fulfillment, the goal of Rasa Core is to generate the reply message for the Chatbot.
Interaction design is a designing process which focuses on creating engaging web Interfaces with logical thoughts, behaviors, and actions. Click to explore about, Data Visualization Is The Future
How Conversational User Interface works?
Conversational UI works just like we talk with a real human to access the different service. Interact with the system, Bot or Human using text and voice, then system responds based on queries and requirement. To cover the basics, Conversational AI occurs in two formats —- Chatbots (Slackbot, Facebook Messenger, Magic, and kik).
- Voice assistants or voice user interfaces (Apple — Siri, Amazon — Alexa, and Samsung — Bixby)
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots are web or mobile interfaces that allow the user to ask questions and retrieve information from computers system. Chatbots are presently used by many organizations to converse with their users. However, with the growth of technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), Chatbots prominently affect UI / UX, providing complete conversational experience to the user.What are Voice User Interfaces (VUIs)?
VUI makes human interaction with computers possible through a voice/speech platform to initiate an automated service or process. Apple with Siri, Samsung with Bixby, Microsoft with Cortana, Google with OK Google, Amazon with Alexa, have already made VUIs familiar to the world. In future, websites powered by their VUIs or will integrate with any of the existing technologies. This will make way for more conversational website content. Conversational UI uses -- Natural Language Processing(NLP).
- Natural Language Understanding(NLU).
- Speech recognition
- NLU
- Conversational level
- Dictionary/samples
- Context
- Business logic
The UI Editor uses the concept of a canvas as an invisible backdrop for your game user interface elements. Click to explore about, Working with UI Canvases
What are the benefits of Conversational UI?
- Better engagement/trust building with end-user through proper interaction.
- Better user experience/convenience & decision support as filling out a time-consuming form & adjusting questions based on the user’s answers.
- Cross-platform integration & Compatibility.
- Allows personalization.
Why Conversational User Interface is important?
- Provides realistic feel while interacting with bot & system.
- Conversation UI use words as in the natural form of communication for people, which make VUI more exciting.
- Increased user attention - targeted questions with clear Call to Action for each interaction for different users.
What are the best practices for Conversational User Interface?
Building & Designing a genuinely helpful and attractive conversational User Interface is still a challenge from a UX standpoint. GUI not works in the same way for Conversational UI works, Conversational UI Design more focuses on to design the conversation flow as naturally and efficiently as possible and focus more on words and user as compared to the visual design. To build an attractive CUI, need to flow the best practices to design a CUI Platform, to focus on the target audience and their problems, should answer the following the question before actual implementation.- What is the user trying to do with the system?
- Is it is solving the user/customer problem efficiently?
- Is it minimizing the user’s effort to communicate with the system?
- How beneficial is this for the target audience?
Conversational user interface technology is fundamentally shifting how technology providers build and how people use software and applications. Click to explore about, Conversational UI for Software Product Innovation
How to adopt Conversational User Interface?
The steps to adopt Conversational User Interface are listed below:Guide to Clear flow
To design a Conversational Interface, Don’t try to develop system to do everything all at once, focus on only one problem/purpose. Define users problem clearly, solution, goal & expectations and the design flow should cover these points -- Define the purpose of the system.
- Set clear expectations on what a system can do and what it cannot.
- Improve discoverability by providing hints.
- Simplify data entry.
- Offer shortcuts.
- Avoid asking open-ended and rhetorical questions.
Understanding User Control
The User should have control & freedom to use the system and need to feel in control over the system, rather than feeling controlled by system.- Don’t leave the user waiting without providing any feedback.
- Allow the user to reset the conversation at any time during the interaction.
- Allow user interruptions & re-engage with the app after they leave.
- Confirm by asking, not stating.
- Easy error handling and error message.
- Provide help, assistance, and suggestions for when the user feels lost.
- Provide the feature to undo, redo and cancel.
Humanize conversation
Conversion between the user and system should make feel the user like talking with other humans, as people are aware that a digital system doesn’t have feelings, and prefer responses that feel warm and Humanize, rather than cold and Robotics. Be sure to design a system whose vocabulary and tone resonates target audience.
Prioritized information & Avoid jargon
Words are the significant part of Conversational Interfaces, make sentences simple, concise and clear. Use clear language and behave like conversing to real people and according to the target audience. Don’t use ambiguous language, technical terms, abbreviations, or acronyms and only show the what user wants and prioritize information according to that.What are the best tools and framework for Conversational User Interface?
- RASA UI: Open source tools to build contextual AI assistants.
- Dialog flow: Build natural and rich conversational experiences.
- Wit.ai: Platform to build applications and devices that you can talk or text.
- Pandorabots: Platform for building and deploying chatbots.
- Careerbot.ai: CareerBot helps enterprises find the best talent connected to existing employees.
- Meekan: The world’s smartest AI scheduling assistant, matches everyone’s calendars in seconds.
- Manybot: A Platform to create a Telegram bot without coding.
- Amazon Lex: Conversational interfaces for applications powered by the same Deep Learning technologies as Alexa.
- IBM Watson: Go beyond Artificial Intelligence with Watson. Watson works with businesses, scientists, researchers, and governments to outthink the biggest challenges.
- Microsoft Cognitive Services
- (Luis) : Language Understanding. Add conversational intelligence to your apps.
- BotMock: Botmock has everything you need to create fantastic chatbot prototypes, and it comes with the power of drag-drop editor.
- Microsoft Bot Framework: Build, connect, deploy, and manage intelligent bots to interact with your users on a website naturally, app, Cortana, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, and more.
- Motion AI: A robust platform for enterprises to build and deploy chatbots for a range of mediums, including Facebook Messenger, Slack, E-mail, Web and SMS.
- Dexter: Dexter is the platform for businesses, brands, and people to create meaningful automated conversations.
- SuperScript: Dialog system and bot engine for Conversational UI.
- Bootkit: The leading developer tool for building chatbots, apps and custom integrations for major messaging platforms.
- Reply AI: The platform to build & manage your Conversational strategy.
- Dashbot, Botsociety, Layer, Statsbot, BotMetrics, ChatterBot, Massively and many more.
Conclusion
A well-completed UI Strategy gives growth to ideas and directions while keeping the probity of the perfect Customer Experience strategy. To know more about Conversational UI strategy, we recommend taking the following steps:- Learn more about Interaction Design
- Explore the difference between Customer Experience and User Experience
