Writing Sample Dialogues with ChatGPT
Work smarter not harder
Sample Dialogues is an exercise that conversation designers use to create a first draft. It involves roleplaying the conversation you’re designing for with a colleague: one person plays the user, the other plays the AI assistant. You run the exercise a few times, take notes, and work out the scenario in more detail.
It turns out ChatGPT is a great partner to run this exercise with. Let me show you!
The importance of prompt engineering
One of the key skills to learn when working with ChatGPT or large language models in general is ‘prompt engineering’. The better you phrase your needs, the higher quality of the output.
Starting off, we want to explain to ChatGPT who it needs to become. We give it some context about the exercise, the brand, the user persona, and bot persona. And finally we define the output: a few versions of the same dialogue. Here’s an example:
Now let’s look at the results.
I’ve included the first one, it’s okay but not great. ChatGPT is asking the customer for their username and password and we don’t like that.
Let’s provide it with some feedback and run it again.
We’re getting somewhere. ChatGPT is so kind to note on top what scenario it is working out for us.
Not only that, without being explicitly instructed, ChatGPT makes up an explanation on how to reset the password. Not a bad try, if you ask me. It’s probably how resetting a password works 80% of the time. If this process is different for your brand, it would only require some small tweaks to make it right. Pretty neat!
Adding personality to the mix
Something else to think about is the tone of voice. Currently, Buddy sounds rather generic and we don’t like generic. Personality is a big part of what makes your AI assistant stand out. It increases likability, but more importantly, since your AI assistant serves as a representative of the brand, you want to make sure it to resonate with your customers.
We didn’t include any guidelines at the start, so let’s give it some:
‘I’d be happy to help’, ‘No worries’, ‘Easy peasy!’ That sounds more like it.
You can make these instructions as detailed as you like. Imagine including a list of acknowledgements, confirmations, and common phrases for your AI assistant. This way, with every sample dialogue you create it will incorporate these and avoiding words and phrases that are out-of-persona.
The art of curation
The examples above show that ChatGPT can be leveraged by conversation designers as a collaborative tool. Once you learn how to coach ChatGPT into producing what you want, it can speed up the design process considerably, getting those happy flows out fast.
It’s not perfect, though. You still need to understand what makes a good conversation successful. And you’ll have to carefully curate its outputs. Even if you get those first drafts out quickly, you are responsible for the finishing touches yourself and we all know the hardest 20% of the work takes 80% of the time.
In due time, the role of the conversation designer will change. Teams that adapt will increase their productivity with AI. As a consequence, the focus shifts to a different part of the job. Designing conversations will become increasingly about the art of curation, working in tandem with AI tools, to smoothen the design process. Until it can take over the conversation fully, of course…
In my next newsletter, we’ll discuss how AI trainers can leverage ChatGPT. Cheers!
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