Introduction to conversational design

Conversational design predates the new concepts introduced by Gen AI and has been around for many years to make the chatbots that have replaced customer service representatives across industries perform better. It involves crafting and refining the conversation flow, prompts, and responses to create natural, engaging, and goal-oriented interactions between the chatbot and its users. The key challenge of conversational design has been to predict the behavior (intent) of human users and model possible responses in advance to give the perception of an intelligent conversation partner. With Gen AI, this step has gotten a lot easier, as LLMs are able to effectively identify intents and craft suitable responses. LangChain as a framework has expanded on these capabilities by giving engineers the ability to craft sophisticated systems with developer-friendly instruction and state handling.

There are two different types of chatbots:

• Intent-based...