Conversational UX is a emerging User eXperience (UX) technique that looks to introduce 2 way communication between the user and the system looking to enrich the typical one way communication form we typically use.

While many current applications are chat based (you and a bot typing to each other in a chat windows) it is not limited to this as we see speech recognition and human movement pattern recognition blurring the lines of user input (I’m thinking: you and your Xbox having a chat about how your days was!)

From a business standpoint using simple chat based approach we can possibly offload resources from humans where high volume, repeatable tasks can be manage by bots and *ideally* not feel like you are interacting with a machine. Its like being able to create your own custom Apple Siri as a service! Recent scenarios were I have seen this be useful is I.T. Help-desk and on-boarding of new staff or students where the vast majority of questions are predictable and can therefore be catered for.

Tools like Wit.ai, Api.ai and BotKit allow non specialist development teams to leverage concepts like Machine Learning to create some pretty futuristic solutions from “automation chat bots” to “voice activated home automation tool-kits” – the application is not locked down to the office!

It is a powerful enough area of IT that Facebook has recently acquired Wit (https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/05/facebook-wit-ai/) in an effort to facilitate businesses to customer communication over Facebook Messenger in an automated manner.

Looking to put your toe in the water of Conversational UX?

Botkits github page has some good tutorials on how to get start with their tool kit allowing you to integrate with cool platforms like Slack or Twilio.

Like the idea but would prefer to to stick with your favorite cloud provider? Well AWS and Azure both have offerings and it certainly feels like this is an areas where companies are looking to invest significant resources. Checkout AWS Alexa and Azure Cognitive Services.

Like all things new we will move forward with trial and error; I have seen an example where a chat bot was used to get the users address details. In this situation a standard HTML form would have been much quicker and most browsers would even pre-populate the form for you. Like all tools there is a time and a place!

So, how do you think these offering can positively affect the way you interact with your customers?

(Originally posted here- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/conversational-ux-rhys-campbell)