PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Welcome to Deconstructing Chat Bots.
I am Priyanka Vergadia and in today's episode,
I have a very special guest from Conversation Design team
at Google, Cathy Pearl.
Thank you, Cathy, for being here.
CATHY PEARL: Thanks so much for having me.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: OK, Cathy, so what is conversation design?
What is your role at Google?
CATHY PEARL: So I'm the Head of Conversation Design Outreach,
which is a bit of a mouthful, but basically it
means I tell people both inside Google
and outside in the world about conversation design,
what it is, and why it's important.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: So what the heck is conversation design?
CATHY PEARL: At a high level, you
can think of it as we're teaching computers
to communicate more like humans and not the other way around.
And you know, a lot of us have had frustrating experiences
with our voices systems.
I don't know if you've ever had a frustrating experience.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: A ton of times.
How do we avoid them?
CATHY PEARL: A lot of times, people
think it's a technical problem, but in fact, it's
often because design best practices were not followed.
So we want to make sure that when people are building
these things, if you follow good design principles,
you're much more likely to have a successful experience.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: I am a developer,
so I really don't write design things.
Where do I get started?
CATHY PEARL: We always recommend you
start with something pretty straightforward
called a sample dialogue.
It's basically like a movie script.
It's a back and forth between your user and your system.
And it really helps you kind of flesh out your ideas
and make sure you're going in the right direction.
And you just write these down.
And I always tell people, don't worry.
They really don't have to be perfect, especially right
out of the gate.
Mine are certainly not perfect when I first write them down.
But over time, just remember that old rule,
there's no great writing, there's only great rewriting.
And after you've written some, you
do just like you do in Hollywood with a movie script,
you do a table read.
You read them out loud.
So you find a willing victim, and then you
have them play the part of the user.
And you just take turns reading out loud.
And you'll be surprised.
You'll actually find a lot of problems and issues
with your design just through that alone, before you've
written a single line of code.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: So, Cathy, I know
how to have a conversation.
Why do I have to design a conversation
before I start working?
CATHY PEARL: I think a lot of people
are used to designing for things like mobile apps or websites
where when somebody taps a button
or swipes or selects a menu item, you know what they chose.
And if you're designing a conversational system,
whether it's voice or typing, people
are going to say all kinds of things
that you're not going expect.
And part of conversation design is really
guiding people to success by showing them
the types of things they're going to be able to say,
in order for you to be able to respond.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: OK, so I get that I need to learn more
about conversation design, but if I write my prompts
correctly, then do you think everything else will just
follow?
CATHY PEARL: The better you write
your prompts and your flow, the more likely
you are going to get answers you can respond to.
But the big thing I always tell people
is when you're working with conversational experiences,
people will always say things you didn't expect.
And that's just kind of human.
I mean, when we're talking, we often
don't understand every single word
that the other person says.
But we don't say oh, we had errors.
That's because we're so good at what we call repair.
We repair our conversations very gracefully
and we get back on track.
So that's the kind of strategy you
want to apply to your conversational systems.
If you can repair things gracefully
when people say things you don't expect,
because that will happen, then you can get them back on track
and keep going.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Can you walk me
through some of the examples of how you
would repair a conversation?
CATHY PEARL: Yeah, so if somebody says things--
says something your system didn't expect,
one quick thing is just to rephrase the options that are
available at that current time.
You definitely don't want to say like, I didn't
understand, or say that again.
You're not helping the person, right?
You're trying to get through your experience
and you're just, you're abandoning them.
So one way is to just sort of rephrase the current options.
Not all the things they can possibly
do, but just like, right now what should they be focused on?
Another part of that is called rapid reprompt.
So that's just a really fast way to do that.
So let's say you're writing a chocolate recipe bot,
and you ask, do you like milk chocolate or dark chocolate?
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Milk chocolate.
CATHY PEARL: And the person says, 65%, which maybe we
don't understand that.
So a rapid reprompt would be, sorry, was that milk
chocolate or dark chocolate?
And that will get people back on track.
And one other thing I want to say about error handling
or repair is a lot of time, that first rephrasing
or rapid reprompt will get people right back on
and going again, but if they have a second error right away,
there's probably not enough information
for them to know what to do or what to say.
So at that point, you might want to have something
a little bit longer with a little more detail, like oh,
your account number is on the upper left hand
corner of your bill, or something like that.
Because they're struggling at that point and you just
really want to help them out.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: OK, so what I'm understanding
is don't just say, I didn't get that, right.
Just try to be a little bit more specific
about what was it that you were expecting
and how can the user get back on track.
CATHY PEARL: Exactly.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: That's actually
very interesting and amazing advice.
We are seeing a lot of smart displays coming into being.
What are your recommendations for designing
for those smart displays?
CATHY PEARL: Yeah, I'm really excited to see
some of these different ways that people can interact.
And I think smart displays in particular,
there's going to be a lot of interesting things
that people come up with.
What we advise is to always start
designing the voice-only experience first,
which might seem a little counterintuitive.
But in fact, the voice-only experience
is often the most constrained and complex.
I'll give you an example.
Let's say you're just writing about business hours.
And if you're thinking about a mobile phone experience,
if I'm asking you, you know, what time is Sushi King open?
You can just pop up a card on the phone
and it has, Monday 10 to 6, Tuesday 11 to 7, or whatever.
But if I just ask on a smart speaker and I say,
what time is it open today?
If you started saying, Monday it's open 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM.
Tuesday it's open--
I mean, that's just like ugh, way too much, right?
So instead, you want to craft the prompt
just like a human would, to answer just the question
itself.
So if I say, is it open right now?
That's a yes/no question.
You should start with yes or no.
If I say, you know, what time does it open on Wednesday?
It opens on Wednesday at 11:00.
And you'll find you might have to write dozens of prompts
to handle that, when on a mobile phone, it's only one card.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: OK.
What would be some of your final pieces of advice
for our viewers today?
CATHY PEARL: Well, first I'm just
really excited to see what kind of experiences
you all come up with that are going to be
really interesting to see.
I also think that voice has really matured
in the accessibility realm.
I think we're finally seeing examples
where voice technology can really
help people who might have motor impairments
or visual impairments or even cognitive impairments.
And I think this just brings us into the idea
of inclusive design, which means we're not just designing
for this person or that person, but really
designing for all of us.
I mean, if you think about it, we all
have impairments from time to time.
Situational impairments, like, I'm carrying the groceries in
and I can't use my hands, or I forgot my reading glasses
and I really want to read this text message.
So being able to use my voice is really handy there.
Or maybe I fall and break my arm or something like that.
So I'm just excited to see that voice technology has really
risen more to the challenge of helping people
who really need it the most.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Yeah.
Thanks, Cathy.
This was awesome.
I really learned a lot about conversation design today.
CATHY PEARL: Thanks for having me.
PRIYANKA VERGADIA: Thank you, everybody,
for watching this show.
I hope that you guys liked Cathy's recommendations
and apply some of those in your conversation designs.
And if you would like to learn more,
go to actions.google.com/design.
Well, I didn't design the sample dialogue for this conversation,
so we have to do take two.
CATHY PEARL: Take three.
That's a wrap.