The Conversational Interface

Partner at Digital Intent and Founder Equity. Kellogg Professor. Very pale.

Hi.

Product strategy, user experience design, web/mobile/bot development anddigital marketing under one roof.

Over 60 team members, with offices in Chicago, Dallas and Columbus.

#620 on the 2015 Inc. 5000, with over 735% revenue growth in 3 years.

An innovation team in a box.

What

Us learning how to interact with computers.

Computers learning how to interact with us.

Conversational

Interfaces

Bots

Conversational

Interfaces

Retrieval based models

Generative models

vs.

Why

Messaging apps have surpassed social networks.

3 billion users

2.5 billion users

Monthly actives for big 4 social networking apps vs. big 4 messaging apps. Source.

2012 2016

1) Feels more personal than apps.

“Language is the most powerful, useful, effective

communication technology ever, period.”

Source

Source

Source

1) Feels more personal than apps.

2) More appropriate for many interactions.

“I like the idea of not having to download an entire app.”

0 Apps

1 App

2 Apps

3 Apps

4 Apps

5-7 Apps

8+ Apps

Most people download 0 new apps per month.

“I actually prefer giving my information to a bot than a person

because there’s no judgment.”

“Sometimes I don’t want to browse - I just want you to

tell me what to get.”

“My kids text all day, but they don’t use email at all.”

1) Feels more personal than apps.

2) More appropriate for many interactions.

3) Available wherever a user wants.

“Conversational commerce is about delivering

convenience, personalization, and decision

support while people are on the go, with only

partial attention to spare.”

Source

“Alexa, ask Uber to request a ride”

I need to return an item.

I’m looking for a black cocktail dress.

1) Feels more personal than apps.

2) More appropriate for many interactions.

3) Available wherever a user wants.

4) Can make non-experts experts.

Messaging apps become the new home screen

How

Building a bot is easy. Building an intelligent

one is hard.

Use a retrieval-based model (for now).

Narrow the domain.

“The challenge in plugging an AI into a

'conversational' chat bot interface is that you

don't have HAL 9000 but are in some sense

pretending to the user that you do.”

Source

Spend a lot of time error handling.

“When it comes to interactions with bot,

alignment should be the highest-order user

experience objective.”

Source

“With chat, the UI is the log file. Debugging

becomes very easy. And every user interaction is

product feedback.”

Source

Acquisition Users visit the site.

Activation Users have a good first experience.

Retention Users come back.

Referral Users tell their friends.

Revenue

We don’t know how new apps will be discovered.

Simplify data entry.

Avoid replicating phone trees.

Curation appears to be more effective (for now).

Natural language filtering.

Image-based search.

Bake in delighters.

Context is huge.

Develop a relationship with the customer over time.

Use notifications intelligently and prudently.

Nobody knows yet.

Group shopping?

When

1) PR opportunity.

2) Capitalize on unsaturated channel.

3) Barriers to entry are lower.

4) Figure out what works faster.

5) More data = smarter bots.

Build

Measure

Learn

Ideas

ProductData

Build version one now. Learn what works.

Repeat.

Let’s build something great together.

Thanks for talking today. To learn more about how DI can help with your digital innovation needs, contact Sean at 312-213-0498 or sean@digintent.com