What is conversational UI?
Broadly speaking, conversational UI is a new form of interaction with computers that tries to mimic a "natural human conversation." To understand what this means, we can turn to the good old Oxford Dictionary and search for the definition of a conversation:
con·ver·sa·tion
/ˌkänvərˈsāSH(ə)n/ noun
A talk, especially an informal one, between two or more people, in which news and ideas are exchanged.
On Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation), I found some interesting additions. There, conversation is defined a little more broadly: "An interactive communication between two or more people… the development of conversational skills and etiquette is an important part of socialization."
The development of conversational skills in a new language is a frequent focus of language teaching and learning. If we sum up the two definitions, we can agree that a conversation must be:
- Some type of communication (a talk)
- Between more than two people
- Interactive: ideas and thoughts must be exchanged
- Part of a socialization process
- Focused on learning and teaching
Now if we go back to our definition of conversational UI, we can easily identify the gaps between the classic definition of a conversation and what we define today as conversational UI.
Conversational UI, as opposed to the preceding definition:
- Doesn't have to be oral: it could be in writing (for example, chatbots).
- Is not just between people and is limited to two sides: in conversational UI, we have at least one form of a computer involved, and the conversation is limited to only two participants. Rarely does conversational UI involve more than two participants.
- Is less interactive and it's hard to say whether ideas are exchanged between the two participants.
- Is thought of as unsocialized, since we are dealing with computers and not people. However, the two main components are already there.
- Is a medium of communication that enables natural conversation between two entities.
- Is about learning and teaching by leveraging Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL), as computers continue to learn and develop their understanding capabilities.
The gaps that we identified above represent the future evolution of conversational UI. While it seems like there is a long way to go for us to actually be able to truly replace human-to-human interaction, with today's and future technologies, those gaps will close sooner than we think. However, let's start by taking a look at how human-computer interaction evolved over the last 50 years, before we try to predict the future.
