Are we seeing the the spiritual child of Clippy emerge? Truth Labs’s Stelios Constantinides has written an article on his\u00a0experiments with conversational UIs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are a spoken or written way of interacting with a device. CUIs aren\u2019t completely new, but they\u2019re becoming smarter, more natural, and\u200a\u2014\u200atherefore\u200a\u2014\u200amore useful.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where CUIs come in: since users already spend so much time in apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger, and even plain-old email, why not integrate your app inside these platforms?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

<\/a>Constantinides \u00a0looks at the design process of creating something that doesn’t come across as a robot, and isn’t as annoying as Microsoft Clippy.<\/p>\n

This links in with Ann Rockley’s concept of Intelligent Content: “Content that\u2019s structurally rich and semantically categorized and therefore automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.”<\/p>\n

For conversational user interfaces to work well, they need to be\u00a0automatically discoverable,\u00a0adaptable and\u00a0semantically categorized. Microsoft Clippy wasn’t, which is one of the reasons why it failed in its purpose.<\/p>\n

It’s still unclear whether this will lead to content being seen as code, or stored in a semantically rich format and inside a content management system. Whichever way, it’s important to recognize that the conversational language is different from written language. We speak differently from the way we write, and this is reflected in how we use messaging apps and authoring tools. Conversations are typically a one-to-one form of communication.<\/p>\n

With Siri, Google Voice and Cortana closed off to most developers, we’re likely to see conversational user interfaces developed as alternatives to these applications.<\/p>\n

One school of thought is\u00a0users will move away from searching using sentences, and, instead, \u00a0learn to type commands (they will write command line instructions). In other words, they will\u00a0begin to\u00a0think and type more like programmers. This is illustrated in the image below.<\/p>\n<\/a>\n

I wonder if this might be a bit optimistic. There are many people find Twitter too difficult to use, and I suspect it would take them a long time to adapt to this approach.<\/p>\n

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This topic is something we cover (albeit briefly) in our Advanced technical writing & new trends in technical communication training course<\/a> (the next one of which is on the 22nd of March).<\/p>\n

See also:<\/p>\n

\n
• Clippy\u2019s Revenge\u200a\u2014\u200aSmart Messaging as Platform Shift<\/a><\/li>\n
• 2016 will be the year of conversational commerce<\/a><\/li>\n
• Assistant-as-a-Service<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

  (With thanks to Simon Bostock<\/a>)<\/p>\n

  What do you think? Share your thoughts using the comment box below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Are we seeing the the spiritual child of Clippy emerge? Truth Labs’s Stelios Constantinides has written an article on his\u00a0experiments with conversational UIs. Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are a spoken or written way of interacting with a device. CUIs aren\u2019t completely new, but they\u2019re becoming smarter, more natural, and\u200a\u2014\u200atherefore\u200a\u2014\u200amore useful. Here\u2019s where CUIs come in:… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[145,194,255,222,229],"tags":[663,664,665,303],"class_list":["post-8927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical-author","category-technical-communication","category-technology","category-trends","category-user-assistance","tag-clippy","tag-cui","tag-intelligent-agents","tag-trends"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n