Introduction to Conversational UI Videos – The Top 5 for Innovative Business Leaders

When you’re not an expert on a given technology, tech talk can get confusing fast. If you’re a business leader looking into conversational user interfaces, you probably want to understand the product you’re investing in and how it can help you—  preferably without having to get a second degree.

These five videos provide a painless way to learn what you need to feel confident and informed while you shop around. They’ll get you up to speed on what conversational UIs are, how they work, and what to look for when you’re buying or developing a conversational solution for your business.

1. The Best for the Basics

If you’re pressed for time (what business leader isn’t?), this video gives you most of the basics in a condensed time frame. In just 13 minutes, Taste Creative explains why traditional graphical interfaces are inherently clunky when it comes to human interaction and how conversational UIs appeal to our natural methods of communication.

In a manner of speaking, we’ve had to learn computers’ way of interacting instead of the other way around. Each graphical UI works a bit differently and requires a little learning on our part— and requires us to download a ton of apps.

In every other area of our life, our communication is conversation and language-based. With conversational UIs, we get to use our natural method of communication, and the interfaces all work in relatively the same way. You ask the UI to perform a task or give you information, and it does. No learning curve required.

2. The Best for Understanding Conversational UI Bots

If you want to understand what goes into creating a conversational UI, this video from Microsoft breaks down the basics of designing them for bots. Fair warning: at nearly 40 minutes long, it’s heavy with information and might be overwhelming if you’re not already familiar with the basics of conversational UIs.

Of course, even with all of that information, it won’t make you a designer, and you probably won’t be ready to go out and make your own without prior experience. Still, it will give you an idea of the thought that goes into creating conversational UIs. If you’re evaluating conversational AI platforms, this video will help you know what questions to ask to better understand their system and how they’re made it.

For more on that, you can also check out our post on how to buy conversational UIs.

As the name suggests, this video focuses specifically on bots. If you’re more interested in voice conversational UIs, the next few videos will be more useful.

3. The Best for Learning About Voice-Based Conversation Design

This video features Google’s Head of Conversation Design Outreach. It has a great balance of basic information for beginners and more in-depth discussions about the creation and future of AI and Voice UIs.

With some behind-the-scenes looks at meetings among Google developers, you’ll learn a little about all of the intricacies that go into making voice-based UIs. And don’t worry— the tech speak doesn’t get too heavy. You’ll understand everything, and you’ll have a new appreciation for just how difficult it is to make quality conversational interfaces.

Of particular interest for business owners, Cathy offers a few insights on what consumers expect from conversational interfaces. Around the 12:40 mark, she talks about why working with experienced conversation designers is so important.

Essentially, low-quality design leads to a low-quality user experience that ultimately drives consumers away.

4. The Best for Gaining Multiple Perspectives

This panel from the 2017 Google Developer Days features a UX designer, a UX researcher, a communication expert, and a Google engineer and developer. Each one came to conversational UIs from a slightly different background, and they all offer different views on the current state of voice UI, where it’s headed, and what work needs to be done.

This video is especially useful if you’re interested in a voice-based (as opposed to text-based) conversational UI. The panel gets into everything from creating personalities for AIs to the difficulties of making interfaces understand human speech and the context of that speech.

If you want to skip the introductions, the actual panel discussion starts around the 9-minute mark.

5. The Best for Learning about the Next Big Thing

If you want to learn about the latest advances in conversational UIs, you have to check out what we’re doing at Clinc.

In all of the other conversational AI videos, experts mention the same problem over and over again: interfaces can’t really understand us. They respond to keywords and phrases and are usually only capable of handling simple requests. You experience this first hand even with some of the most advanced conversational UIs in existence.

Give Siri or Alexa a task that’s too complex, and you’ll hear something like, “Sorry, I can’t help with that,” or “Here’s what I found on the web for that.”

Conversational UIs generally need simple, direct commands and have serious trouble understanding the messiness and complexity of normal human speech.

Enterprise conversational AI platforms, like Clinc, provide something totally different.

In this video, you’ll see how Clinc’s enterprise conversational AI platform helps banks respond to customers’ naturally long, detailed, nuanced, overly complex and drawn-out questions and requests.

Clinc delivers this superior user experience by leveraging neural networks to create true, human-in-the-room, artificial intelligence that can handle the unpredictability of real human speech.

And banking is only one of many industries, like fast casual dining and gaming, that Clinc is transforming with truly conversational UI experiences.

Even if you’re just beginning to investigate user interfaces or artificial intelligence, these quick videos can give you a foundation to build your voice UI or AI assistant pilot project.

Use these videos, and all of the resources on our website, to give you the crash course you need to grasp the current state of conversational UIs and, most importantly, develop an informed perspective and decision framework for your business.