Photo by Ivan Samkov
It’s fair to say AI is on somewhat of a rampage. From retail to graphic design, no industry has been safe from machine-led disruption these past 12 months. At the heart of this new wave of artificial intelligence lies human-emulating chatbots and life-changing voice assistants. Together, they’ve laid the platform for what’s known as conversation UX. But what is this new trend that has every UX agency scrambling to learn AI and is it a good thing for users?
What is Conversational UX?
Conversational UX is the term given to a user flow based on human-like interaction between a user and an AI assistant. Interaction can come in the form of text, voice, or any other human language.
History of Conversational UX
In 2011, Apple launched the Siri feature on the iPhone 4S. This allowed users to converse with their smartphones and reach their desired outcome without as much as a click or a swipe. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, chatbots can be traced as far back as the 1960s to Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza.
But it wasn’t until the noughties that chatbots started resembling what they are today, being used in customer service-facing roles. Alaska Airlines’ Ask Jenn was one of the first customer service chatbots used to handle very simple customer queries.
Conversational UX in 2024
Chatbots in 2024
If chatbots have been around for the past 60 years, why the sudden noise? The simple answer is, in 2024, they’re better. And for the first time, chatbots are capable of not just thinking like humans but thinking better than us too. While some user interfaces may share similarities, the user experience of chatbots and AI assistants in 2024 has undergone major surgery.
Predecessors were simple at best, and painfully frustrating at worst. But AI chatbots of 2024 are built off the back of a far superior beast, what’s known as generative AI.
Generative AI is the term given to artificial intelligence capable of taking information and creating new content based on machine learning. It’s this that has taken conversational UX from novelty to human-like, leaving us with interactions that end with far superior outcomes compared to what most humans could produce in the same amount of time.
Voice assistants in 2024
Siri is regarded as the first modern-day voice assistant, or certainly the one that most people have used. But voice assistance has come a long way, and in 2024, devices are no longer just used for checking the time or setting an alarm.
So much so, that pairing voice assistants with conversational UX has opened up a whole new market. Enter virtual home assistants; this $20 billion dollar market has attracted the likes of Amazon and Google and has paved the way for humans to delegate daily tasks to machines with a simple voice command.
Examples include asking your home assistant device to alter the temperature of your home, start up your vacuum cleaner, and even make you a coffee!
The benefits of conversational UX
Speed: Whether the quality of AI’s output, as a result of conversational UX, is better than what a human could produce is up for debate. But one factor that’s not up for debate is speed. The Midjourney website states that it takes their bot, on average, one minute to go from a user’s prompt to image creation.
Simplicity: Conversational UX is starting to be used to dumb down the onboarding process that comes with new, complex technology. A great example of this is crypto wallet, Brian, that allows users to type commands instead of turning to YouTube tutorials to save the day.
Accessibility: Where previously, visually impaired users would rely on a screen reader, websites, and apps can now offer similar, or even identical, user journeys for both blind users and visually unimpaired users.
Effectiveness: 88% of US customers state that chatbots are effective in resolving customer service issues. Given that they can be available 24/7 too, this makes them extremely effective for both businesses and users.
Examples of Conversational UX
ChatSpot
HubSpot is a marketing software product that mainly operates in the B2C space and is used by over 200,000 companies.
Hubspot’s ChatGPT-powered ChatSpot acts as your virtual marketing assistant. Instead of digging through Hubspot’s vast amount of data, you can simply ask ChatSpot to carry out a competitor analysis or help out by drafting some copy.
Google Home
“Google, switch off the lights” – what started as a bit of a novelty has boomed into, as already mentioned, a multi-billion dollar market.
These voice-powered smart devices often position themselves as an eco-friendly option. But in terms of UX, don’t underestimate the value of these devices to elderly and disabled people. Suddenly, forgetting to turn a light off upstairs isn’t so much of an issue.
Bing Designer
When it comes to modern-day generative AI, many people’s ‘wow moment’ first comes when using an image generator.
Bing Designer allows users to enter a prompt, such as “Smiling monkey wearing sunglasses”, before getting to work on creating an image to match the prompt.
Duolingo
Conversational UX hasn’t just enhanced products but paved the way for completely new ones. There’s no better example of this than the language-learning app that has been downloaded by over half a billion people, Duolingo.
After being launched using older UX patterns, with the help of conversational UX, the Duolingo app can now translate your spoken sentence into any language in a matter of seconds.
Amy Jones is a freelance writer from Manchester and has written for many different business publications. With a range of knowledge in the business and investing sector, she is an avid researcher and writer in the field. Having worked closely with a number of different businesses, Amy is now looking to specialize in workplace health and disputes and is currently researching and working closely with different health brands for this.
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