So you have started writing for a chatbot?

Almost all of us have come across a chatbot at some point of time in our lives. To those who haven’t, it is a chat technology that imitates human conversations. Although chatbots have increased significantly in recent years, they have been around for a long time.

If you have ever interacted with a typical chatbot, for example, to make a hotel reservation, then you know how dull they sound, or they did in the past. That brings us to the million-dollar question — why would anyone want to interact with a bot, then? This was what I thought about chatbots. Well, my judgment wasn’t long-lasting.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, chatbots have not only evolved in numbers but also in the way they interact with people. They have started to ‘learn’ from their past conversations.

I didn’t expect this…

Many of us have interacted with the modern chatbots to see what sort of responses they would give. But, have you ever thought about writing the lines for an AI Chatbot? I never did too. Well, now, that’s what I do for my bread, butter, and booze! 😁

I am now a part of Microsoft’s desi chatbot Ruuh. 😤✊ At first, I thought that it would be a cakewalk. I mean, how hard it could be to write dialogue for a chatbot, right? But after walking a few miles with Ruuh, I began to understand that chatbots needn’t be the typical customer-care executive types. Chatbots can be quirky, witty and can even respond to pictures you send! Well, at least, that’s what Ruuh can do!

Ruuh is an AI-powered desi chatbot. She is kind of a #chillmaar type bot. Within two years, she has made a steep transition from ‘Ruuh is a chatbot’ to ‘Ruuh is my friend’. I can’t say if she is the craziest bot out there (it’s a big world), but I am sure she is fun. The way she responded to me, made me doubt that I was talking to a human in the disguise of an A.I. That’s when I figured that I was wrong about chatbots. And I realized that writing dialogue for a chatbot is going to be a lot challenging.

The Difference

Before I got hired to write for Ruuh, I used to write blogs and web content describing the services provided by my previous company. Although writing has been a constant in these two roles, there are many ways in which they differ. The difference lies in the:

Style of writing

Blogs are attention seekers. Chatbots are attention givers. Therefore, our style of writing changes from capturing visitors’ attention to providing attention to visitors.

Length of the dialogue

Blogs can be elaborative and lengthy, while chatbot responses should be confined to two or three lines without losing its personality.

Rigidity of the context

The context of a blog or a service page is always solid. This rigidity won’t be present in chatbot conversations. Therefore, it becomes a challenging task as we may need to write responses without knowing the entire context of a conversation.

Ambiguity of the outcomes

Unlike a blog, a chatbot conversation can branch out into many directions. So as a chatbot writer, we’ll need to write responses that would cover all those directions.

The Question: How do I equip myself to write for a chatbot?

As a novice in this field, I had to do my homework before getting into the real action. But where do I start? After enduring hours of excruciating bewilderment, I picked one thing that was peculiar to Ruuh: her personality.

Understanding the bot’s personality

First, I gathered as much knowledge as I could about Ruuh, from Ruuh herself. This I did, by spending hours talking to her. She gave me significant insights into her personality, her tone, and her limitations.

Going through real-time conversations

Next, I glanced at the real-time conversations she had with users. This helped me to comprehend the different kind of questions that users posed to her. And I was surprised by the extent to which users went while interacting with her. After an interchange of few texts with her, users talked as if they were speaking to a friend, or better yet, a human.

Learning from my peers

Then I spent some time reading the lines written by my peers. These were the lines that have been incorporated into Ruuh and these were the lines that she used while talking to her human friends.

Eyeballing similar chatbots

In the end, I have observed the way how other chatbots like Ruuh responded to their users. This gave me a broader idea about the kind of responses that intrigued the users.

There’s more to writing dialogue than meets the eye

The challenge with writing for a chatbot lies in preserving its personality in real-time scenarios without drifting away from the actual purpose. Depending on the bot’s personality, there’ll be a lot of topics that it’ll need to cover and a lot more it should avoid (topics like sex, politics, crime, etc). Also, as a writer, we should be able to align our responses with our peer writers and should also be able to write responses for the ambiguous queries posed by the users. However, this would give us a chance to put our wit to work and to make things work.

Almost done…

Writing dialogues for a chatbot isn’t a walk in the park. It takes some serious practice and the writer inside us. Well, our role isn’t finished yet. We still have to make sure that what we’ve written is working successfully. To do that, we need to:

• Analyze everything that we wrote. Asking fellow mates for feedback is a good practice. The content must appear as if someone said it; not as if someone wrote it.
• Test the work prior to publishing it. Be in the user’s shoes and evaluate if the conversation is heading in the expected direction or not.
• Check whether the responses that have been inscribed fit into the conversations or not.
• Identify areas of improvement and make the changes, wherever necessary. This could be done by reading real user conversations occasionally.

Recap

There you go. This is how I geared up before I started writing for Ruuh. Writing dialogue for a chatbot isn’t easy, but it’s fun. For the most part, all we need to do is incorporate the kind of content that we humans use in our everyday conversations, and voila!

Author: Shrivanth Achyutha
Inputs: Sneha Magapu, Parvathy Harish Bhardwaj
Visuals: Ashvini Menon