What is Conversational AI? Works, Benefits, and Challenges

As the tasks we need to do on a daily basis move to increasingly robust and complex digital platforms, the variety of GUIs that each of us are required to interact with is expanding. With each new GUI––a new software system at work or a new app on our phone––users have to learn the language of icons and the flow of menus all over again. Central to Helpshift’s customer service platform are bots and automated workflows. Chat bots and QuickSearch Bots can be deployed in minutes with a code-free visual interface that does not require professional developers. QuickSearch Bots are connected directly to your knowledge base to instantly respond to basic customer questions and enable you to deflect support tickets. This summer, we released a web app that’s not the type of app typically thought of as a candidate for Conversational UI.

Fear that the question you ask might get judged, that the opinion you hold may change the way others think about you for the worst. Designing a coherent conversational experience between humans and computers is complex. There are inherent drawbacks in how well a machine can maintain a conversation. Moreover, the lack of awareness of computer behavior by some users might make conversational interactions harder. Also, employees integrate with digital workers/assistants thanks to conversational interfaces and delegate some monotonous jobs to them.

Conversational UI Best Practices

When the flow you present to your user gets narrowed down to a specific action, a simple button can work better than typing a whole line of text. For a conversational UI which is not using AI to interpret user’s answers, this is the most challenging part of writing a script. A conversation begun with a bot using conversational AI can be transferred to a live agent within the messaging app or on the phone without the conversation losing momentum or data. Both of these are great examples of Conversational UI that are often the first things in the minds of anyone already familiar with the topic. Voice assistants are widely recognized after becoming infamous in the news recently for privacy concerns. Chat bots are similar to the robo callers everyone’s gotten before when calling their bank or ISP.

Since the process is pretty straightforward, it can ask the lead key qualification questions and help your sales team prioritize them accordingly. Conversational user interfaces aren’t perfect, but they have a number of applications. If you keep their limitations in mind and don’t overstep, CUIs can be leveraged in various business scenarios and stages of the customer journey. On a graphical interface, users can follow visual and textual clues and hints to understand a more complex interactive system.

Basic Customer Support

Chatbots are useful in helping the sales process of low-involvement products (products that don’t require big financial investment), and so are a perfect tool for eCommerce. Providing customers simple information or replying to FAQs is a perfect application for a bot. However, not everyone supports the conversational approach to digital design. A comScore study showed that 80% of mobile time is dedicated to the user’s top three apps. Hence, it’s much easier and more effective to reach customers on channels they already use than trying to get them to a new one. The main selling point of CUI is that there is no learning curve since the unwritten conversational “rules” are subconsciously adopted and obeyed by all humans.

• They work on the principle of a structured flow, often portrayed as a decision tree.
• Finally, skips could fast-forward the conversation to a different script block.
• There’s no need to insist on a purely conversational interface if your platform gives you a more diverse toolbox.
• Unless you’re trying to integrate something like AI, a lot of the legwork in the Conversational UI paradigm is actually in the research and design that goes into it.

Instead, they had to search for information in the graphical user interface (GUI) – writing specific commands or clicking icons. Past versions of CUI consisted of messenger-like conversations, for example, where bots responded to customers in real-time with rigidly spelled-out scripts. If you want to learn even more about conversational UIs, you can check out Toptal’s informative article delving into emerging trends and technologies.

Part 1. Designing the verbal communication

For example, there was a computer program ELIZA that dates back to the 1960s. But only with recent advancements in machine learning, artificial intelligence and NLP, have chatbots started to make a real contribution in solving user problems. Building a bot has gotten easier down the years thanks to open-source sharing of the underlying codes, but the problem is creating a useful one. It would take considerably long time to develop one due to the difficulty of integrating different data sources (i.e. CRM software or e-commerce platform) to achieve superior quality. The incomplete nature of conversational interface development also requires human supervision if the goal is developing a fully functioning system.

VUIs (Voice User Interfaces) are powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and voice recognition technology. The term conversational AI (artificial intelligence) refers to technologies, like virtual assistants or chatbots, that can “talk” to people (e.g., answer questions). We can easily find conversational user interfaces like Siri, Alexa, and support bots in many websites in today’s life. The basic idea behind the conversational user interfaces is that they should be as easy to use and talk about as talking or having information from a human being.

Retail, media companies distributing content, research and consulting are some of the industries that will drive business value from chatbots. Productivity conversational interface is designed to streamline the working process, make it less messy, and avoid the dubious points of routine where possible. Now let’s look at some of the tools that are used to build your conversational interface. While the name is slightly misleading (interface versus experience), many platforms already have UI that you have to fit into (for example, Facebook Messenger) therefore it’s the experience that users get. For example, at Landbot, we developed an Escape Room Game bot to showcase a product launch.

Users seemed to have difficulty with anything a bit more complex. Rule-based bots have a less flexible conversation flow than AI-based bots which may seem restrictive but comes as a benefit in a number of use cases. In other words, the restriction of users’ freedom poses an advantage since you are able to guarantee the experience they will deliver every time. Let’s dig deep to find out if a conversational user interface is worth your attention.

Also, such an interface can be used to provide metrics regarding performance based on the task management framework. The primary purpose of an assistant is to gather correct data and use it for the benefit of the customer experience. Chatbots are fun, and using them as a marketing stunt to entertain your customers or promote a new product is a great way to stand out. Chatbots can quickly solve doubts about specific products, delivery and return policies, help to narrow down the choices as well as process transactions. Firstly, despite the hype, chatbots are still not that widely used.

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Checklist for Making a Great Conversational UI for your Applications

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Read more about Things you should know about conversational UI here.