With recent advances in natural language understanding techniques and far-field microphone arrays, natural language interfaces, such as chatbots and voice assistants, are emerging as a popular new way to interact with computers. They have made their way out of the research labs and into the pockets, desktops, cars and living rooms of the general public.

But although such interfaces recognize bits of natural language, and even voice input, they generally lack the ability to engage in natural conversation. In other words, they often lack persistent context (i.e., remembering what we are talking about across turns) and conversation management (e.g., understanding common actions like "what did you say?," "what do you mean?," "okay," "thanks," "never mind," etc.).

In order to help designers and developers build conversational agents, sociologists and UX designers at IBM Research-Almaden have developed a new design system: the Natural Conversation Framework (NCF). The NCF provides design concepts, principles and patterns adapted from the field of Conversation Analysis (CA), as well as a design thinking process, for conversational UX.

This talk will cover the following topics:

- The difference between natural language and natural conversation

- Concepts and principles for conversational UX design

- A pattern language of 100 conversational interaction patterns

- An adaptation of design thinking to conversational UX design

Robert J. Moore is a research scientist at IBM Research-Almaden, where he examines the intersection of human conversation and technology. He has recently co-authored the book, Conversational UX Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Natural Conversation Framework. In the past, Dr. Moore has worked as a scientist at Yahoo! Labs and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and as a game designer at The Multiverse Network. He holds Ph.D., M.S. and B.A. degrees in sociology with concentrations in ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and ethnography. http://ibm.co/H0gMdF

Online Meetup: Natural Conversation Framework for Chatbots and Voice Assistants