Designing an AI Plugin for Conversation Assistance
Supporting the workplace with Generative AI
Problem Statement:
The challenge was to design an innovative AI-powered web plugin that addresses specific workplace needs, leveraging generative AI to provide support to workers in their respective job roles. The design process should adhere to responsible AI principles, taking into account ethical considerations, potential biases, and implications for the workforce.
Solution:
Conversation Summarizer Web Plugin inspired by Google’s chat features
Identifying a Workplace Need:
For this challenge the Job Role and chosen workplace was a one for a Project Manager who is leading/managing multiple projects at the same time. This plugin is designed to make things easier for them and help manage conversations with efficiency. It offers significant support by providing concise and accurate summaries of conversations, enabling them to quickly grasp the key takeaways, action items, and decisions made during discussions. This tool can streamline meeting management, enhance productivity, and ensure that everyone on the team is aligned with the project’s progress and goals.
Designing the Plugin:
The functionality of the Plugin encompasses various aspects to address the nuanced needs of Project Managers. It automatically generates summaries, identifies key points, categorizes under relevant topics, provides reply suggestions, and even allows for sharing the summaries to other team members.
Integration:
Integration with project management tools such as Asana or Trello and calendars is seamless, enhancing the user experience and extending functionality. Seamless integration with project management tools ensures that the plugin populates project dashboards with meeting summaries. Moreover, the plugin integrates with calendars, allowing for the automatic scheduling of meetings directly from the conversation from the chat timestamps.
Generative AI Usability:
Generative AI is central to the plugin’s capabilities, employing state-of-the-art abstractive summarization techniques and leveraging natural language processing (NLP) to extract relevant information. The user interface prioritizes intuitiveness and customization, allowing users to tailor the level of detail in summaries to individual preferences. Visual representation of action items and decisions, along with automatic reply suggestions, contributes to user convenience. Generative AI also helps the plugin to adapt to different conversation patterns and styles to ensure accurate summarization in their respective tone and allowing the users to change said tones.
User Interface and Experience:
Prioritizing intuitiveness, the user interface is designed to be user-friendly. It allows customization of summary detail, provides visual representations of action items and decisions, and offers automatic reply suggestions for user convenience.
Ethical Considerations and Responsible AI:
Bias Mitigation: The plugin employs bias detection algorithms, continuous model training on diverse datasets, and user review options to minimize biases.
Privacy and Data Security: Ensuring robust data security, the plugin implements encryption and access controls, communicates transparent data practices, and obtains explicit user consent.
Transparency and Accountability: To maintain transparency, the plugin provides clear explanations of the AI model’s summarization processes. Users can trace the reasoning behind specific summary decisions and report biased or inaccurate summaries.
Impact on Workforce: The plugin anticipates positive impacts, enhancing Project Manager productivity, allowing strategic focus, and empowering team members with easy access to meeting summaries.
Testing and Feedback:
Real-world testing involves colleagues and friends in project management, focusing on user experience and productivity. Feedback leads to iterative improvements, including features such as summary length customization, style adjustments, and direct sharing.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, the web plugin represents an innovative and thoughtful solution to the workplace need identified for Project Managers. Balancing technological innovation, user experience, and ethical considerations, the prototype reflects a comprehensive approach to responsible AI use. The iterative design process, incorporating user feedback, ensures the plugin aligns closely with the needs and preferences of its intended users. Tools and Plugins such as this show the potential of AI-powered tools in enhancing workplace efficiency and collaboration keeping while being ethical and helpful to the organization.
Co-author:
Tanmay Sameer Shravge
