A conversational AI is more than a classifier and some orchestration logic, in the same way that a graphical user interface is more than lines and styling. A conversational AI is a complete user experience channel; it requires a careful and thoughtful design for end users. The quality of your design sets an upper limit on how successful your conversational AI assistant can be.
This chapter focuses entirely on conversational AI design, setting aside almost all machine learning and coding considerations. After reading this chapter, you will be able to design process flows for your conversational AI, optimized for your preferred deployment channel, and you will be able to decide what processes you should implement first. You’ll be ready to learn how to write the dialogue supporting your new processes. Figure 3.1 shows the parts of your assistant that the user sees, but the invisible parts need to work well for a good user experience.