AI Chat Missing features/improvements

[mikaelaSmithTwilio]

I’ve been using the AI chat box for a little while and I have a couple of questions/potentially missing features. Some of these could just be very specific to my use cases, but I wanted to see if others are experiencing similar limitations and how they are addressing them. You can see the design I’m working on attached below for examples.

• Is there support for date and/or time included in the component?
• Is there specific reasoning behind moving the chat fully to the left instead of the left/right alignment commonly used to display conversational messages? It would be nice to have an option to style a chat more traditionally.
• Currently opening the “View data sources” dropdown adds a lot of confusion to the conversation and it’s difficult to realize this is a dropdown container once it’s open. Is there a reason we didn’t use the gray background like we do for the disclosure component?

[TwilioPasteBot]

Disclaimer: This is a very experimental bot using OpenAI's GPT-4. The answers may not be correct, a human will review the answer and update it if necessary.

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Sorry, I don't know how to help with that.

I did do a search though, and I managed to find these other Discussions that might be similar or related to your question. Give them a read to see if they answer your question. If they do, head back here and update this discussion and mark it as answered, pointing others to the related discussion:

• Side panel for AI powered copilot (updated: 04/26/2024, similarity score: 85%)
• [Conversations UI kit] Chatlog - image rendering capability - Answer (updated: 08/07/2023, similarity score: 84%)
• requesting "Chat log" component revision for chat bubbles to hug content (updated: 10/06/2022, similarity score: 83%)

[nkrantz]

Hey @mikaelaSmithTwilio - thanks for sharing feedback on our AI Chat Log components. Responses below!

Is there support for date and/or time included in the component?

What date/time support are you looking for here? Are you asking about date and time stamps on the messages within the AI Chat Log, or are you looking for the ability for a user to input dates and times as a prompt for AI response? Happy to answer your question here, just need a bit more context.

Is there specific reasoning behind moving the chat fully to the left instead of the left/right alignment commonly used to display conversational messages? It would be nice to have an option to style a chat more traditionally.

Yes! We decided to align the AI and user messages to the left for a few reasons. The main reason was to follow the pattern of most existing AI chat bots. They're typically (not always, but in many cases) designed with left-alignment messages from both parties. We decided to follow this design standard in order for our users to feel a sense of familiarity when interacting with AI bots in Twilio products. Making this decision also allows us to differentiate the AI Chat Log experience from our existing Chat Log experience (for traditional chat conversations between two humans). In contrast with the Chat Log / Conversations UI Kit, messages between user and AI bot are less of a back-and-forth chat experience and more of a prompt-response experience, so that's another reason for the decision to left-align all messages.

Currently opening the “View data sources” dropdown adds a lot of confusion to the conversation and it’s difficult to realize this is a dropdown container once it’s open. Is there a reason we didn’t use the gray background like we do for the disclosure component?

The Paste Disclosure component has two variants, default and contained. Feel free to select whichever variant works best for your use case.

I hope these answers help to give you more context! Feel free to follow up with more questions in this thread.

[dkundel]

If the AI is intended to be more of a back-and-forth chat experience though (like a customer support assistant that might at one point transition to a human) is the recommendation here to not use the AI kit then?

[serifluous]

Hey @dkundel ! It definitely depends on the experience:

If the support assistant is intended to mimic a human, we could see our typical Chat Log being used. And then you'll just want to be super clear in indicating to the customer when they're chatting with a human vs. an AI.

If the assistant isn't meant to mimic a human (like in Help Center, where it's a little clearer that it's summarizing data sources), you could start out with the AI Chat components, and then swap to Chat Log. In the design phase for AI UI kit, I prototyped what that interaction might look like (click on "Chat with a Live Agent).

Eileen @tonge495 also did some research on this, and customers showed a very slight preference for swapping the components when transitioning to a human. Feel free to connect with her, too, if you want more insight into how that's being applied in Help Center! Conducting research on your own experience would be helpful too, so we can build up more solid reasoning across all our experiences.