Since ChatGPT was introduced to the big public in November 2022, I was amazed to see how a conversational interface has been massively adopted by people in such a short time (1 million users in just 5 days after launching). It really showed the power of the GPT-model to the average user, only visually using chat. For you who don’t know, earlier versions of the GPT model was already used in the Google Assistant “voice” technology. But then some extra layers of potential failures were added on top of that as well (noise filtering from speech, speak-to-text interpretation, etc.). But still, I was often amazed how well the model recognized written intents and entities in 2018.

With the mass adoption of conversational AI-tools like ChatGPT and BARD, the average user is getting used to asking longer questions to a system providing you with an on-par generated answer. Now I get intrigued by how this new behavior will affect the current search behavior of users. Will people start to ask longer questions in the search box as well? Or do conversational UIs need to come up with more smart ways to receive contextual information to a short question by adding buttons asking for context?

An interesting example I saw lately is the example of Klevu MOI where they introduced a toggle between chat and search. https://www.klevu.com/moi

Also see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3dRF7DQwho