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With recent advances in natural language understanding techniques and far-
field microphone arrays, natural language interfaces, such as voice assistants
and chatbots, are emerging as a popular new way to interact with computers.
They have made their way out of the industry research labs and into the
pockets, desktops, cars and living rooms of the general public. But although
such interfaces recognize bits of natural language, and even voice input, they
generally lack conversational competence, or the ability to engage in natural
conversation. Today’s platforms provide sophisticated tools for analyzing
language and retrieving knowledge, but they fail to provide adequate support
for modeling interaction. The user experience (UX) designer or software
developer must figure out how a human conversation is organized, usually
relying on commonsense rather than on formal knowledge. Fortunately,
practitioners can rely on conversation science.
This book adapts formal knowledge from the field of Conversation Analysis
(CA) to the design of natural language interfaces. It outlines the Natural
Conversation Framework (NCF), developed at IBM Research, a systematic
framework for designing interfaces that work like natural conversation. The
NCF consists of four main components: 1) an interaction model of “expandable
sequences,” 2) a corresponding content format, 3) a pattern language with
100 generic UX patterns and 4) a navigation method of six basic user actions.
The authors introduce UX designers to a new way of thinking about user
experience design in the context of conversational interfaces, including a new
vocabulary, new principles and new interaction patterns. User experience
designers and graduate students in the HCI field as well as developers and
conversation analysis students should find this book of interest.
