Talk to your blog - Part 1: How to evaluate user centric interactions
Yet another "Chat with your ..." ?
You might have heard or have experience with some tools that go in categories like "Chat with your docs", "Chat with your PDF", ... and think that this is just another one of these.
To some extent you are right, but I would like to invite you to stay with me and we go through some more or less subtle additional challenges when taking this to the next level. Which I also want to reflect in not calling this "Chat with your blog" but "Talk to your blog" which should reflect the fact that it's not about some chatting around but really creating a way of communicating more like a dialog. Another aspect is that here we want to focus on the fact that the underlying data is meant to have a more personal and humanly connection to the visitor and not only being plain knowledge, facts and data.
First a little introduction to the idea behind that?
The idea of "Talk to Your Blog" is to provide your webpage's users with a modern way of interacting with the website's content. Creating the ability to let your website's users ask questions or request summarizations for specific needs can make the existing information even more valuable and tailored to your website visitors.
As the content of a website can be seen as a part or facet of the author, using AI to interact with its content is also a way for the author to provide website visitors with a means to engage with their views on certain topics. The author not only creates valuable articles but also becomes an active part of the website experience for their visitors.
Possible scenarios could be:
- The website visitor is interested in a specific topic that is part of your website, but doesn't know where to find information about it exactly
- The website visitor has a specific interest that is partly covered by several articles, but not specific to the visitors request or state
- The content should be provided in a short summarized form
- The content should be provided in a simpler language
- The website visit tour may want to select a specific time to support the situation which could be a very supportive tone
What are the main challenges for this to actually work out well?
Besides the usual challenges with AI based functionalities and public access there are more subtle challenges we face if we take this game serious.
The usual challenges with AI and public access
We face challenges of finding the right information from the available content and also formulating the answer in a correct and helpful way. It also has to be taken into account that people with different technical, cultural, ethical backgrounds visit a site.
Also poeple who just want to find out the weaknesses of and ways to misuse a system backed by generative AI which makes it absolutely necessary to define guardrails both for questions and answers.
The functionality needs to be easy to access
Although this sounds like a rather trivial thing, it is often the case that bad accessibility of a helpful feature reduces the actual benefit you can get from it.
Providing the visitor with a easy but none-distracting way of interacting with a tool is key to success.
Communication: Understanding the intent to provide the right content
The visitor might be in a certain specific or challenging face in their life, and it would be ideal to take that into account to avoid inappropriate or unsupportive answers.
Communication: The answers should be correct, helpful and similar to the way information is provided on the site
Besides that it is beneficial to provide the answer in a tonality and way of formulating things that match the rest of the content to provide a aligned experience.