Great conversation design begins with role play
As you begin to think through your conversational design, and especially if you are evolving a chatbot into a digital human experience, review and role play how key interactions should make you feel. Written content is not always appropriate for spoken performance; using simple sentences and amending scripts to be suitable ‘for the ear’ is key. Role playing and documenting your own expressions and sentiment throughout the conversation will help guide the inputs and identify any content that is difficult to perform and mis-aligns with the desired user experience.
Guiding the conversation
Similar to the customer journey for your website (maybe even in parallel), it’s vital you continue to guide the user through a conversation. The good news is that a digital human, unlike a chatbot or even voice assistant, is more helpful to guide the user mainly due to the fact that it’s not just command driven.
Small talk versus on-topic conversation
As you design the conversational path and role play through the emotional impact, also keep in mind the ability to include small talk. There are several great small talk conversational engines out there including Blenderbot or even GPT-3. The digital human advantage here is the ability to plug into many different “brains” or natural language processing engines, and layer the experience with highly curated content. So while GPT-3 is guiding small talk, Watson (or any other NLP) is the foundation for your guided or on-topic conversation.