Designing conversations for bots and AI

The Design & Content conference is just over a month away! Designers and content strategists team up. Hear from industry leaders about crafting experiences and telling stories that shape the future of the web. A day of workshops, two days of talks, and thoughtful extras in one of the most beautiful cities, Vancouver, BC, Canada. By now, most designers have either interacted with a chatbot or been asked to create one for a client. We obsess over the details once our bot has come into being. More than anything, we emphasize to ourselves — and to our clients — how hard we work to create a human-like experience. All a bot needs to do is understand the user well enough to accomplish a task. This is the most basic experience we design for, but it’s mostly an illusion. The bot doesn’t understand anything at all, it’s simply trained to respond to an event — usually a keyword. These experiences only display intelligence. We’re most capable of designing effective human-machine conversations when the machine is a simple Thinking Machine, and we’re not layering personality on to a tool that can’t live up to the expectation of human. That’s a simple approach for a simple brain: a bot that only needs to interpret and display simple data. Truly intelligent data — and the bots that represent it — still needs human knowledge to be effectual, ethical, and profound. Human knowledge, however, is not simple. It’s the dominant obstacle when it comes to even the most straightforward AI. This complicates not just the way we design conversation, it impacts how we train our tools to learn. Human knowledge includes all the nuance, morals, empathy, and fortitude we want from our machines, but it also includes bias, irrationality, and behavior based on experiences, not facts. Designing AI for humans means much more than chirpy, agreeable copy and emoji apologies. It means designing machines that are capable of contextualizing verbal behavior — however irrational — and continuing to provide value that does no harm. Above all, understand that we’re doing more than designing effective conversations. There is more at stake with this work than we might realize. Designers have a unique opportunity to develop and own the process by which we teach machines to learn from us, and it is imperative that we do so with all the humanity, we can muster.