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Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot's Hood

Friday, June 14, 2024 • Rosenfeld Community
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Coffee with Lou #4: Taking a Peek Under the Rosenbot's Hood
Speakers: Peter Van Dijck and Louis Rosenfeld
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Summary

What happens when you cross an eager librarian, a happy puppy, and 800 UX experts? You get the Rosenbot—Rosenfeld's new GPT-4 level chatbot, trained on our books and hundreds of hours of conference and community call recordings. What went into creating the Rosenbot? Lou is joined by SimplyPut's Peter van Dijck, an old friend from the IA community and the chief architect of the Rosenbot. If you're beginning your journey into developing generative AI products, you'll want to join Lou and Peter to learn from their lessons, ask questions, and share your own thoughts on AI's role in making curated content more useful and impactful.

Key Insights

  • The Rosen bot uses curated, high-quality content from Rosenfeld Media to avoid common pitfalls of enterprise chatbots operating on messy internal data.

  • Significant project resources, around 30-50%, must be devoted to evaluation combining user tests, expert reviews, and repeatable automated metrics.

  • The chatbot intentionally avoids summarizing entire books to prevent cannibalizing book sales, instead acting as an entry point to authors’ original work.

  • Users and researchers often don’t know how they will use AI tools initially; the use cases evolve through interaction with the technology.

  • Building AI conversational agents requires embedding follow-up questions and memory simulation into the interaction design beyond a basic large language model.

  • Semantic search and topic analytics behind the scenes enable insights about conversation content trends and authors' influence in real time.

  • Balancing fresh, current content with older foundational material is challenging since methodologies and societal norms continually evolve.

  • There is a tension between jumping in to build and learn quickly versus cautious, deliberate product development; both parties in the talk appreciate different approaches.

  • Interactive UI elements like expandable answers and filters for broadening or narrowing responses are planned to enhance the conversational interface.

  • The Rosen bot acts as a creative companion and research assistant, helping accelerate idea exploration and uncover relevant historic knowledge efficiently.

Notable Quotes

"If you don’t jump in and learn, you’ll spend your time reading stuff on it and not really understand the tech."

"People forget the expertise every seven years and have to learn everything again—this bot helps make that expertise accessible."

"The content behind this bot is curated and high quality, unlike the typical confusing, outdated information in corporate repositories."

"We devote 30 to 50 percent of the project time just on evaluation with real users and experts to ensure quality and safety."

"The bot doesn’t summarize books because we’re a publisher and don’t want to cannibalize book sales—it points users to the original sources."

"We’re building in the attribution of ideas to authors and speakers, emphasizing the humans behind the expertise."

"Chatbots aren’t just the language model—they have structure around intent classification, safety checks, and session memory simulation."

"Sometimes you have to build stuff and learn from it rather than wait for the perfect moment or tools."

"AI in design can act as a creative companion, helping explore ideas and analyze past research more efficiently."

"The product is imperfect, probably about 60 percent there, but if we get to 80 percent it will be a compelling tool for UX content."

Ask the Rosenbot
Amy Marquez
INVEST: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
GenAI for UXers: A Rosenbot Demo and Discussion
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Maria Giudice
Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Jake Burghardt
Finding More Inroads into Research Impact
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Tricia Wang
SCALE: Discussion
2018 • Enterprise Experience 2018
Gold
Boon Yew Chew
Making Sense of Systems—and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Indra Klavins
A Design Ops Girl in a Dev Ops World
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Erin Hauber
Design is Not the Frosting on the Scaled Agile Layer Cake
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Himanshu Bharadwaj
If design had a heart
2026 • Rosenfeld Community
Sarah Kinkade
Design Management Models in the Face of Transformation
2022 • Design at Scale 2022
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Erin Hoffman-John
This Game is Never Done: Design Leadership Techniques from the Video Game World
2017 • DesignOps Summit 2017
Gold
Iain McMaster
Design and Product: from Frenemy to Harmony
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Sam Proulx
Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jesse Zolna
Inviting the Whole Org to Come See For Yourself
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold

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