The Rosenbot and the Rosenverse: An AMA with Lou Rosenfeld
Summary
What happens when you mix together nearly 20 years of lovingly-created UX books, conference recordings, conversations, and much more? And fold in a well-designed chatbot to help pull all this curated goodness together? You get the Rosenverse—Rosenfeld Media's new membership platform that you can try today! Join Lou Rosenfeld for a quick tour of the Rosenverse, and bring your questions and suggestions.
Key Insights
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Rosenfeld Media has curated UX content for over 15 years, including 60 books and 220 podcast episodes.
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The Rosenverse is a membership platform with free and premium tiers, offering access to community events, Slack, and exclusive content.
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The Rosen bot is a GPT-4 based AI that synthesizes Rosenfeld Media’s vast curated content to answer UX questions with sourced references.
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The platform requires membership, even for free events, to streamline access and community building.
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Quality of recordings varies, especially older community sessions, but they meet reasonable production standards.
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Lou sees his role as a 'starter' who initiates projects but relies on the business infrastructure to maintain the platform long term.
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Future improvements include deeper conversational UI beyond text input and output, such as clickable prompts for expanding answers.
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Integration with other AI agents (e.g., IBM research bots) is envisioned to create a multi-agent ecosystem for research and guidance.
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Slack remains an important but challenging community platform due to cost and conversation complexity for AI analysis.
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There is interest in linking AI-summarized content directly to specific pages in books, though technical challenges exist in correlating vectorized text to pagination.
Notable Quotes
"I’ve been in the UX world for like 30 something years before we were even calling it UX."
"We took thousands of hours of curated content and built a chatbot around it so it’s not garbage in, garbage out."
"We do about a hundred free community sessions a year where anyone with membership can attend."
"The Rosenverse is a weird mix: it’s a for-profit business but also a neutral community resource."
"As a starter, I’m great at beginning things, but the company has the infrastructure to maintain them."
"Peter van D**e really pushed us to think about the bot as part of a conversation, not just a query-response machine."
"The Rosen bot gives you sourced, clickable links to books and videos, so you can dig deeper."
"Some early community recordings sound rough, but the overall error rate for the AI transcription is pretty low."
"Slack is growing steadily for us, but it’s hard to moderate and expensive at scale."
"Imagine a world where research bots at IBM talk to the Rosen bot to give you better guidance on interpreting research."
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