Overview
“A computer program designed to have a conversation with a human being, especially over the internet.”
A successful chatbot or conversation agent needs to build an effective relationship between the human being and the computer program. It needs to listen, understand, act, and learn to meet the users’ outcomes.
The following list outlines the recommended steps to achieve this:
- Purpose: understanding the user problem that you are trying to solve with the chatbot.
- Topic breadth: the breadth of topics that you want the chatbot to be able to converse about.
- Topic depth: within those topics, the level of detail that you want the chatbot to cover.
- Expression: defining the personality of your chatbot.
- Building the chatbot: mapping the flow and content of the chatbot, and defining the conversation architecture.
These steps are not linear. You are learning and iterating throughout the process, so you move back and forth between each step.
Figure 1: Steps for designing a chatbot, IBM Design for Artificial Intelligence, Sept 2019, Lawrence Humphrey.