(2019-08-16) Storytelling With Chatbots

Storytelling with Chatbots. The dream of a computer personality that helps us sort through massive troves of data is closer than ever, and Annalect Labs has been exploring the technology to program such a personality.

we wanted to make data work accessible to a wide range of colleagues, without forcing them to learn SQL, explain how they can run commands in the terminal

but it takes a lot of time to plan and design a GUI and roll out the training for every new tool that is programmed at Annalect, so we thought, our data-fetching programs are already a text interface, let’s take from Neal Stephenson’s SnowCrash librarian and wrap the program in a personality.

The main purpose of AUBI is to help users find the program that retrieves the data they want, and has the authority and credentials to run it on their behalf. Additionally, we wanted AUBI to provide documentation on request, and allow Annalect Data Scientists to give AUBI the ability to recommend and run their new tool without writing additional narratives and learn from what users are asking for.

Lesson One: Pretending to be Intelligent Isn’t Helpful

Our first approach to writing a chatbot personality was to anticipate all the different questions someone might ask, and tell the chatbot what to say in response.

However, we abandoned this strategy for a couple of reasons:

Lesson Two: Adventures Need Walls

we were inspired by the old choose-your-own-adventure game Zork

we re-wrote the narrative so that every message from AUBI implied or explained what you could say next.

Lesson Three: Allow Walking in Circles

if they wanted to keep exploring we had to give them the ability to loop though. The caveat was not to navigate to the beginning, but navigate them to a certain intersection of the narrative. For AUBI, this manifests as the option to run the same tool again, or dig into documentation for that same tool, to choose a related tool, or to choose a different goal altogether

Lesson Four: Computers Let You Undo

It looks like chatbots, while able to handle flexible input from the user, are still pieces of software and people expect that they can undo their actions.

Lesson Five: There’s an Algo for That

We were able to refactor our conversation to include fill-in-the-blank templates that updated themselves from a spreadsheet hosted online. This way, content producers and programmers could edit the tools and their descriptions without having to edit and debug AUBI’s narrative program.