The art of conversing with a machine: When the designer becomes a dialog writer

The adoption of conversational interfaces like chatbots and personal assistants by the general public has meant that designers are being offered an increasing number of projects. Their expertise is required in several fields such as IT and linguistics, as well as user experience, which is a central part of the work of designers. However, these interfaces seem to depart in several respects from other projects involving interfaces. They are characterized by interactions in the form of short dialogs and thus hold out the promise of more natural interactions with users, as they are developed with human language in mind. We will try to understand how the role of designers in such projects might reveal a partially successful humanization process. Given the dialog-based nature of these interactions, designing also becomes close to the work done by dialog writers. We will explore how fruitful the proximity between designing conversational interfaces and playwriting can be. This will allow us to better answer the main question of this article: To what extent are conversational interfaces a new object for designers, not only with regard to the skills required, but also to the designer-interface-user relationship at work?