Introduction

  • 2 minutes

The user interface (UI) between people and computers has evolved greatly over the years. UI design had a humble beginning in paper-punch cards. Command-line interfaces and windowed applications came next. Now, UIs have progressed to include personalized phone apps and web sites. New concepts in UI design continue to make computers easier, more accessible, and more fun to use!

Conversational UIs

Conversational UIs and bots are a new type of user experience (UX) that has the potential to radically change how we use computers. You no longer need to know what buttons to press. In this new UX, we see the computer as an assistant rather than as a tool. We want to speak to this assistant by using natural language in our own words.

With this UX transition, we need to take extra care to make sure users are comfortable having conversations with a computer. People can subconsciously expect a bot to act like a human. They might attribute emotions to the bot assistant, and in general, feel more personal involvement. So, we need to make sure we build conversational UIs responsibly.

Example scenario

Suppose you work for a school system. Your current assignment is to help students transition to online learning.

To meet that goal, you plan to build a more effective and engaging UI for the students. Specifically, you'd like to develop a basic bot to help students learn geography.

The bot interface is often engaging for users. The bot seems to have a human-like personality. A bot helps users feel like they're talking with another person. To users, it doesn't seem like they're giving instructions to a tool or computer. But when human feelings are involved, frustrations can arise.

To avoid frustrations and miscommunication, you can build a responsible bot. This module shows you how to make a responsible geography bot.

Learning objectives

  • Understand the principles that define what makes a bot responsible.
  • See why it's important for your bot to be responsible.
  • Learn the basic building blocks for creating conversational UIs.
  • Explore tools and services that you can use to add intelligence to your bot.
  • Find out about factors that determine which responsible features to include in a bot.
  • View alternatives for making your bot responsible when resources are limited.

Prerequisites

  • None