The world of conversational design opened up to me over two years ago, when my company shifted from Mobile to Voice. We were fortunate to be one of the first companies to recognize that oice is going to take over our interaction mediums, and that businesses will have to react fast to the conversational revolution that has just emerged.
And indeed, today, we can say that conversational interactions, whether through chat or voice, are changing the way we live and do business, offering an efficient, focused, and cost-effective solution that suits our needs.
However, conversational design didn't just "appear" into our lives. It is the evolution of a long human-machine communication history, in which with every step we take, we get closer and closer to naturally humanized interaction with computers.
In this book, I will highlight some of the main components of conversational design, while distinguishing between chat and voice interfaces. Although I do refer to the technicalities behind building conversational solutions, I chose to focus on the challenge of designing a successful conversational interaction that will be natural, comprehensive, and supportive of users' needs.
The world of conversational design is very dynamic and it evolves constantly. In fact, as I was writing this book, I needed to go back and update some of the chapters to keep the information up to date.
However, this is also what makes this technology so interesting and unique. We are in the midst of a revolution, and we are a main part of it, Conversational designers, developers, device-builders, and vendors are all shaping the way conversational design will be in the next decade. There is a lot to innovate, to accomplish and achieve, and as pioneers in this market, we can all make a difference and leave a mark.
Writing this book, I wanted to provide you the readers with an easy-to-use guide to build your first conversational applications. I've included some historical background, provided best practices on what to do and what not to do when building a chat or a voicebot, and incorporated concrete examples designed by some of the leading brands world wide.
I hope you will find this book a useful introduction to the world of conversational design and that it will inspire you to build and create new and improved experiences of human-machine interaction.
This book requires a general understanding of UI building, but the coding level is kept fairly simple: a basic grasp of markup languages and JavaScript will suffice. No in-depth knowledge of Artificial Intelligence is required, except for basic concepts. Knowledge of Natural Language Processing will be helpful, but is not mandatory. Developers and product managers, and even C-level executives, will profit from this book, since it shows them the interactive, expressive side of conversational AI. It is impossible to understand modern NLP and AI products without this.
Chapter 1, Conversational UI is our Future, addresses the concept of conversational UIs by exploring what they are, how they evolved, their challenges, and how they will develop in the future. The chapter gives a timeline of how UI has developed over the years and the difference between voice control chatbots, virtual assistants, and conversational solutions.
Chapter 2, How Not to Build Your Next Chat and Voicebots, discusses and analyzes the requirements for building a conversational application, by looking into bad examples and use cases. Sometimes, knowing what not to do, is more worthy than knowing what you should do.
Chapter 3, Building a Killer Conversational App, provides five tips for making a conversational application successful. Those tips are backed up by some chat and voice examples.
Chapter 4, Designing for Amazon Alexa and Google Home, takes a deep dive into the design of conversational solutions by looking at the two leading voice-enabled solutions, Amazon Alexa and Google Home. This chapter reviews both technical and voice UX recommendations and offers examples.
Chapter 5, Designing a Facebook Messenger Chatbot, discusses the structure of the Facebook Messenger platform, its advantages, and disadvantages. This chapter includes a tutorial on how to build a FB Messenger bot using its internal tools and discusses other tools that are commonly used by developers in the market.
Chapter 6, Contextual Design – Can We Make a Bot Feel More Human?, tackles the challenge of creating and building contextual conversation –one of the greatest obstacles that businesses and developers face today. In this chapter, we will learn about contextual design and provide a few recommendations on how to achieve it.
Chapter 7, Building Personalities Your Bot Can Be a Better Human, touches on the importance of the personality of your bot, and gives guidance on how to choose it and what it should reflect when it's interacting with your clients
Chapter 8, A View into Vertical-Specific Bots – Financial Institutions, looks at bots in the financial sector and their unique components.
Chapter 9, Travel and Commerce Bot – Use cases and Implementation, the challenges of travel and eommerce bots, and learning from real use cases and implementations by some leading industry players.
Chapter 10, Conversational Design Project – A Step-By-Step Guide, guides the reader through using all the concepts discussed in the book and implementing them in their first conversational application.
Chapter 11, Summary, recaps what has been discussed throughout this book and provides insights into the future of conversational design.
To get the most out of this book, I suggest trying to gain experience with as many conversational applications as you can. Try and experiment with chatbots on various websites and on Facebook Messenger. If you have access to an Alexa device or Google Home, try to use some of the trending skills and analyze their shortfalls and successes. If you don't have either of those devices, use the Google Assistant on your mobile phone (you can download it on iPhone as well).
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781789139624_ColorImages.pdf.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, also appear in the text like this. For example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
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