What is Conversational UX?

Overview

When a language model is incorporated into an application, the application interface becomes natural language. This is why we use the term conversational UX, as the user appears to be conversing with the application.

OpenAI was the first to popularize this type of UX. They released a large language model called ChatGPT. It is tuned specifically for performance as conversational AI and can perform a wide variety of tasks, including question answering, document generation, and summarization.

Messages

In a conversational UX, there is a user, an assistant that takes instructions from the user, and a system that defines the premise of the conversation.

Conversations are composed of messages.

system: You are a helpful assistant.
user: Who won the world series in 2020?
assistant: The Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series in 2020.
user: Where was it played.

Prompt

Messages from the user to the assistant are also commonly referred to as prompts.

For example, in a question-answer scenario, the prompt is a question. What is the population of Tokyo? to which the AI model generates an answer based on relevant information. Since the prompt has a significant impact on the quality and relevance of the model's output, it is important to create effective prompts.

Natural Language Manipulation

Due to the fact that language models are models that deal with natural language, messages are composed by natural language. As a result, in applications employing conversational UX, users perform operations in natural language.