Design practices for Chatbots and Conversational UI

Last Updated : 13 May, 2024

Living in the 21st century and who do not use AI tools like ChatGPT to ease their tasks minimize their efforts and maximize their output. There'd be hardly someone except the content writers! Tools like ChatBot & Conversational UI have made our lives easier to a much better and greater extent. Wondering what am I talking about and why. Then let's have a look at the features to get your concepts crystal clear.

Chatbot

Chatbot, as the name suggests, is a bot, is an artificially intelligent tool that has features of answering like a human and providing answers to all your questions. Here, some might confuse the term "bot" with the term associated with Hacking, where bots are used for malicious purposes. But we are talking about chatbot which has human interactive features and that gives us a real-time feeling of talking to a real human. It is governed completely by AI - Artificial Intelligence and prime time concepts of ML - Machine Learning & LLM - Large Language Models. These large language models are designed to interpret NLPs - Natural Language Processing that makes the interaction of devices & humans a lot easier than it was earlier. It not only performs all tasks that can be performed by humans but also has the potential to think and perform tasks beyond the capacity of humans. It is highly useful in today's cutthroat competition.

Conversational UI

Conversational User Interface is no different from chatbots. It is just a much more simplified and easy to use version. Where chatbots are concerned only with textual information, conversational UI related devices such as Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant are all governed by voices including text. In simpler words, the devices using conversational UI's have an edge as it provides the ability to be able to directly communicate with the device in a human friendly way. It has interactive user designs and features that make it feel realistic and reliable. They have enhanced features like providing commands to play audio, make a call, tell a joke, advice etc. All those tasks that could have been advised by a human can be done by conversational UI designs.

Why to use (Need and Necessity & Key Benefits)

E-commerce and healthcare websites: Websites that are contained by flourishing businesses, they provide an option of conversational chatbots. This makes it easier for the user to provide their preferences as per the listed options. Many a times they also provide a chatbot to answer textual questions according to availability. They ensure reply by training the chatbot, as in when the user enters first message, a greeting text is provided by chatbot that ensures consistent connectivity.
Increased customer & user interaction: The user feel connected and assured of being heard.
24/7 access: A human might commit error in answering or maybe not be available every time, but a chatbot is available for 24 hours and a reply to the user is confirmed.
Cost effective: Multiple people need not be hired, which thus reduces the dependency on human labour. Human resources can then be implemented to more complex and advanced tasks, whereas chatbot can simply continue handling queries.
Data Collection & Analysis: Chatbots have a tendency to store the previous data and interests of consumer. Thus, when the consumer asks a question, it recalls from it's memory what were the previous responses of the user, and accordingly frames it's future answers.