AI-Assisted Conversation Design with Voxable

Our goal in creating Voxable is to help teams build better conversational experiences. Born from our own experience designing and developing voice and chatbot assistants, Voxable has the features we know teams need to successfully collaborate on conversational projects. But the conversational AI space is incredibly fast-paced, so we’re also constantly scanning the horizon for what’s coming next. At the moment, we’re really excited by the promise that AI-assisted design holds for conversation designers.

It’s becoming common to receive assistance from artificial intelligence (AI) when engaging in creative work. AI is the ability of machines to think, learn, and behave like humans. When Gmail or Google Docs suggests how I might want to complete a sentence I’m typing, then I’m crafting that email or writing that report with help from AI. In fact, I didn’t actually write that definition of AI—I simply asked an AI to write it for me. That’s an example of AI-assisted creative work.

Check out what happens when we add AI-assisted conversation design to Voxable:

Predicting Conversational Flows

Today, conversation designers are expected to predict several potential paths a conversation with a user may take. By covering these various routes in their designs, designers offer the best chance for a flexible implementation and, ultimately, a successful customer experience.

Often, this takes the form of predicting the next possible conversational step in a sample dialog. Whether anticipating a user’s request or the assistant’s response, conversation designers need to put themselves in the shoes of their users and try their best to imagine what they might say at each step in a conversation.

But no matter how many predictions designers make, users constantly come up with unexpected requests. This usually means that teams building conversational experiences end up discovering many new conversational flows only after they’ve released their voice or chat app and begin reviewing the conversation logs for unsupported requests.

Building Intelligent Assistants (with an Assist from Artificial Intelligence)

Since predicting the next potential step in a conversation is such a common conversation design task, anything Voxable can do to optimize these predictions will reap huge benefits in terms of both design and development time saved and the robustness of the final conversational experience. It will also reduce designers’ cognitive load, freeing up their mental energy for the more challenging aspects of the conversation design process like refining language to meet branding guidelines, interviewing subject-matter experts, or communicating with stakeholders.

As demonstrated in the video above, Voxable can leverage cutting-edge AI techniques to suggest potential conversation turns with the click of a button. With each successful suggestion, Voxable reduces the cost of a project and accelerates time to market. AI-assisted design features like this can transform a product from a tool into a teammate—no longer something we simply utilize to achieve a goal, but an active participant in the process itself.

We recognize that we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to how AI can offer assistance with conversation design. If it’s possible to generate an entire conversational flow by repeating the process of generating conversational steps, how can we apply that capability to the process of running Wizard-of-Oz tests? How can AI help generate potential flows from existing customer support logs? We’re excited to answer these questions as we continue to add functionality to Voxable.

Applying AI to Conversation Design

Although what we demonstrated in the video hasn’t been widely released as a product feature yet, we’re phenomenally impressed with the impact the AI’s had on our design process. We still have plenty of questions to answer about the best ways to implement this kind of AI-assisted conversation design and that’s where we could use your help.

At Voxable, we want to build intentionally, so we collaborate with our users to make decisions about product features. If you want to join us as we bring AI-assistance to the world of conversation design, please try Voxable for free so we can hear from you. We look forward to advancing the state of conversational technology together.