This document discusses best practices for designing chatbots for global and localized use. It recommends researching user intent, choosing platforms that support multiple languages and domains, writing prompts in a conversational style, ensuring graphics are culturally appropriate, and testing personalities with real users in different cultures. Localization vendors should have experience with the domain and locales. The chatbot design should allow adding new conversations and languages over time.

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“Alexa, Tell Me About
Global Chatbot Design
and Localization”
Only human after all
Ultan O’Broin (@localization)
Disclosure: Senior Director,
Oracle Applications User Experience
February 2018

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Safe Harbor Statement
The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for
information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a
commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon
in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or
functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.
I’m speaking in a personal capacity and industry observer of localization, global UX and related areas as a give-
back to the community. Views and opinions expressed may not necessarily represent Oracle’s.
No money has changed hands.
Honest.

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About Ultan O’Broin (aka @localization)
• Senior Director Oracle Applications User
Experience, EMEA and APAC
• Outbound UX design & sales enablement
• Design patterns, patents, accelerators
• MultiLingual Magazine Editorial Board
• UX, Info Design, L10n, I18n (MSFT, ORCL)
• Speaker, Writer, Blogger, Chatbots
Magazine, Planeta Chatbot, MultiLingual…
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[1] BI Intelligence, January 2016 and Statista, April 2016Source: http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/public-sector/ps-chatbots-101-info-3745967.pdf

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Chatbots: Conversational UI
• An interactive dialog between a user and a computer system that allows
each to “talk” with the other, using a natural, contextual way to assist with
a user’s question or request.
• “What could be a more natural way of interacting?” No special training,
devices, or UI’s: SMS, Text, Voice…
• The Power: Agency of “Doing Stuff Easy, Fast”
• The Promise: Digital democracy by automating drudgery, augmenting
what’s loved, reducing friction to participation.
• Design Affordance? Either make it beautiful or make it invisible.
What’s that all about?

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Some Fave Chat

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That Said… Technology’s Involved
How to Design Conversations that Influence People
(Ambit in Chatbots Magazine)
Image via Joe Metcalfe: “The
Childlike Beauty of Learning (And My
Work Out In The Vietnamese
Language)”

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Conversational UX Design

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Chatbot UX & the Enterprise
• Business process: Needs and tasks
• Simplicity of intent
• Multi-role users
• Multi-generational use
• Mobility, cloud participation
• Contextual awareness
• Data security
• Internationalization and localization
• Accessibility
• Extensibility
Design and Context of Use

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Chatbot Design Deconstructed
- Intents
- Utterances
- Prompts
I just learned
Spanish!
Your new
skill
Spanish has
Been added
HCM Qualifications
Accomplishments:
Spanish 6/17/17

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Designing a Chatbot Conversation
The user’s experience is influenced by:
• Conversational JTBD (Why a chatbot?)
• User expectations about the
experience (e.g., human vs. machine)
Design goal
Take user intents and shape the
conversation experience in a way that
solves the user’s problems, regardless
of language, typos, goofs, rambling,
expertise, etc.

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Intent: Discovery through Research in the Wild and Lab
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imaginBank: A Bank for Millennials

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Language Design: Types of Chatbot Conversation
Do
Users need to perform mini-
transactions quickly while on the go.
Go-To
Users working in the cloud may need to
navigate to other places to see the
information they need.
Lookup
Users need to:
• Quickly look up information in the
cloud
• Immediately see that their intent
has been understood and is being
worked on within the context of the
conversation
Decision Making
Users may need decision support for
“what-if” scenarios, such as confirming
possibilities or predicting outcomes,
leveraging behind-the-scenes analytics
to discover possibilities.
Do
• Schedule a meeting with
the sales team for
tomorrow.
• Alexa, ask TED Talks to
play the latest technology
talk.
Lookup
• What’s my remaining
hiring budget for this FY
if I fill this req?
• Hey Siri, what is the
stock price for ORCL
today?
Go-To
• Open my reminders list
for today.
• Go to my performance
objectives for this
quarter.
Decision Making
• When is the best quarter
for sales to contact this
prospect?
• Which journal is going to
close first this period?

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Demo: https://youtu.be/tgTFokzoKRoDemo: https://youtu.be/mKPvuLklGUE

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Chatbot UX for the Enterprise
Look at the user’s environment holistically:
• Where do they work?
• What do they do?
• How do they do it?
• How do they work with others?
• How do they communicate with others?
Design for intent

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Chatbot UX for the Enterprise
• Choose simple flows that users are
likely to encounter frequently.
• Consider downstream language
needs.
Most chatbots today are developed in
English, and then localized and/or
translated.
Example: The United Nation’s World Food
Programme’s (WFP) Food Bot that’s used
in 33 different countries
Beyond NLP, Design for prompts
Source: http://mvam.org/2018/08/07/our-experiment-using-facebook-
chatbots-to-improve-humanitarian-assistance/

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Prompts: Create and Translate with Conversational Style
• Beyond Lorem Ipsum.
• Be human, not too human.
• Reflect style, tone, how we talk.
• Keep it short, fast, sweet.
• Be consistent and contextual.
• Leverage domain and slang terms.
• Take care with humor.
• Use culturally appropriate images
(yes, emoji too ).
• Be honest with errors and failure.

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Chatbot UX for the Enterprise
Choose platforms that support language, domain, and ones that learn/are trainable.
Examples:
• Oracle Intelligent Bots
• Dialogflow
• Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS)
• RECAST.AI
• Domains: Consumer vs. enterprise
• Sub-domains and the IRA
Platform Designed for Utterances

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“Localization” Challenges

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Ye Olde Language Challenges and Processing
Confidential – Oracle
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Ye Olde Language Challenges and Processing
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Conversational UI: New Challenges
• Cultural theory and interaction
• Personality
• Gender, names …
• Sentiment, emotion
• Surrounding chit-chat
• Pop references, time sensitive …
•  Emojis as a language.
• Slang, synonyms, urban, pidgin.
• Is AI the ultimate UX challenge?

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Is it better to translate or re-create a conversation?
• It depends . . .
–Audience
–Architecture
–Cost, time, quality
–Effort of AI vs. non-AI?
• English not “just”
another language
• Re-creating conversation?
Script-writing, localization,
transcreation, cultural guru-ing…
Source: Artem Nedrya of translationdesigner.com in
Chatbots Magazine: Do you want your chatbot
converse in foreign languages? My learnings from
bot devs.

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Personality Design
anthropomorphism(not to be confused with personification).
In general, you can think of anthropomorphism as the
attribution of human motivations, beliefs and feelings to
inanimate things like computers, vehicles, robots, and so on.

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Personalities Go Digital
• Apply Magic Sauce:
https://applymagicsauce.com/
• But, know your product, audience,
brand…
• Talk the Talk: Create a Voice
and Tone Your Customers Love
• Research, ask, don’t rely on
personas and profiles…
• Test in the wild, real tasks, real people,
real places

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Global Practices Checklist

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Conversational UI Best Practices
 Research user intent.
 Reflect context of use.
 Choose chatbot platforms that
support language(s) and domain(s), and
that learns/is trainable with the “lingo”.
 Write or translate in conversational
style.
 Pick a “localization” vendor with
domain and locale UX experience.

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Conversational UI Best Practices
 Write complete strings, and provide
scripts of content context.
 Take care with graphics, images,
humor, emoji relevance, and so on.
Ensure that they are editable or
replaceable.
 Create personalities that “fit” the local
culture’s dominant traits and JTBD. Test
with real people in real situations, not
personas.

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Conversational UI Best Practices
 Multilingual architecture for adding
conversations and languages later.
 Create glossaries of terms, synonyms,
slang, abbreviations, and so on.
 Apply conversational design
heuristics, garner reviews, and then
usability test in context with real users.
 If there’s an accelerator design kit or
service, then use it!

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Resources

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MultiLingual: www.multilingual.com
Chatbots Magazine: Chatbotsmagazine.com
Planeta Chatbot: Planetachatbot.com (Spanish)
SF Globalization Meetups
https://www.meetup.com/sf-globalization/
International Multilingual User Group
www.imug.org/
Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory
(Wikipedia)
Connections