Right Back to the Start

Week four started off with getting the sudden news that I would be working alone for A3. Quite frankly, I don’t mind working alone but it really increases the pressure specially in the last moment when I have submissions in other classes too. On speaking to my team members I realised that they are the ones who want to work alone which is weird because they insisted on writing the code all by themselves in A2 in the first place due to time constraints. Never the less, it made me take more responsibility of the work and relook at it. I started my A3 by having a chat with Venkat and Gaurav about the feedback for the earlier work. I actually realised that while I believe in looking at practicality and feasibility of ideas, they were wanting us to look way into the future and imagine what the future of AI and chatbots could be like. Obviously then I had completely missed the mark.

I reworked the screens, the name, made them both more inviting. Re looked at all the features, tried to find loopholes in the current idea, even spoke to a faculty and students to understand what all the chatbot can possibly do and the scope of its conversations. This wasn’t easy for me because though coding is something that I like and have been in touch with, I know very little about technology. Designing for technology is not something I am good at because I simply don’t understand it.

The coding of the prototype did change due to the feedback, I made it more fluid with the pace of the conversation left in the users hand, instead of a conversation starting and ending in the same way, I tried to make it like a person you would go to for help, where you ask for what you want and get that in return. In order to do this , I had to rework the flow of control for the code. A couple of basic functions remained the same but the rest had to be reworked.

My video aimed to show the different features of the bot rather than showing too many conversations happening and I think A3 was basically a lot of fixing old things rather than trying out a bunch of new things. Not very interesting but definitely helpful.

This class has actually had a bunch of things for me, I expected nothing and I started off with having a bunch of question marks. Starting from the A1 video, which I felt was so superficial as all we cared about was how its supposed to look on the outside and I was furious that this was what we were doing in a programming class to the A3 where we brought the code and video together.

I think its tougher to decide what the bot will say than code it. The coding part is challenging and fun but deciding what the bot will say and how that will sound human like is confusing. I don’t think we put in conscious effort to sound human and answer like one.

By the end of this class I think I have finally gotten over the nostalgia for coding. Coding a chatbot is not fun. Now that this class is over I am wondering what we will be doing in the next two classes. Fingers crossed, may it not be another chatbot. I still can’t put on a designers lens while coding, I code as a coder and leave back the designer while I do. They live in very different places.