As part of the equivalent of a qualifying exam at the MIT Media Lab, I had to do a study on multi-turn interactions in conversational agents. I focused on what was at the moment (this was in 2020) a state of the art agent which was the Domino’s pizza ordering assistant using the Google assistant. This assistant was built with conversationality in mind. I ran a user study to identify how the agent’s workflow was and any issues that were present. I found the following issues:
•Problem with contextual edits
•“Redo” keyword clears the order
•No undo
•“Clear order” to exit doesn’t work, it doesn’t even clear the order
•Timeouts/misunderstandings are repeats
•Great exiting/better than Google’s default exiting
•Help is a global help that is not very useful
To address these, I built a conversational agent in DialogFlow, which had the following improvements (particularly following conversational patterns):
•Starts with an Open Request pattern for adding items to an order rather than waterfall of slot filling
•Repairs in much later turns for editing items
•Undo functionality for errors operations
•Extended telling pattern for menu, ingredients
•Simplified menu with only 4 primary items
•Recently placed order unlockable only if you have previous orders
Below are some audio examples of the Domino’s agent vs. my agent.
