Part 2. Designing for success

 

You’ve decided what kind of AI assistant you need. Now you need a plan to build it.

Benjamin Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” An effective design process can save weeks or months (or years) of heartache. It’s not enough to decide to use an AI assistant: you must tailor the technology to your particular use case and scenario. This part will help you design an assistant that meets the needs of both the business and the customers.

AI assistants automate processes, often through a conversational interface, which implies that you have processes to automate. In chapter 3, you’ll learn how to select the right practices to automate through your AI assistant based on user needs and process complexity. You’ll also learn how to assemble a dream team for building an AI assistant and see how the members of this team can best work together.

Chapter 4 covers how to design dialogue that improves your users’ experience. Bad dialogue can ruin an otherwise-useful conversational AI. You’ll learn dialogue practices for both voice- and text-based assistants.

AI assistants are ultimately created to serve a business need. Chapter 5 teaches you how to select the right metrics to evaluate your assistant against that business need. The business need and its associated metrics are foundational to all other aspects of the build cycle.

When you complete this part, you’ll be ready to start building your own AI assistant.