/conversation-patterns

name: conversation-patterns
description: Turn-taking, repair sequences, grounding, and dialogue structure for human-AI interaction.

Conversation Patterns

Conversation between humans and AI follows predictable structural patterns. Designing these deliberately — rather than leaving them to model defaults — is core interaction design work.

Turn-Taking Structure

Every human-AI conversation has a rhythm. The designer decides:

• **Turn length**: Short exchanges (chatbot-style) vs. long-form (essay generation). Match turn length to task complexity.
• **Turn initiation**: Who speaks first? Does the AI greet, or wait? Does it ask a clarifying question before acting?
• **Turn boundaries**: How does the user signal "I'm done"? How does the AI signal "I need more"?

Repair Sequences

Conversations break down. Repair is how they recover:

• **Self-repair**: The AI detects its own error and corrects ("Actually, let me revise that...")
• **Other-repair**: The user corrects the AI ("No, I meant the other one")
• **Clarification requests**: The AI asks for disambiguation before proceeding
• **Graceful misunderstanding**: The AI acknowledges confusion without frustrating the user

Design repair sequences explicitly. Don't rely on the model to improvise them.

Grounding

Grounding is how participants establish shared understanding:

• **Confirmation**: "Just to confirm, you want me to..."
• **Summarisation**: "So far we've covered X, Y, and Z"
• **Reference resolution**: Handling pronouns, anaphora, and ambiguous references
• **Context anchoring**: Reminding the user what the AI knows and doesn't know

Dialogue Structure Patterns

Common structural patterns for human-AI conversation:

• **Interview**: AI asks questions, user answers, AI synthesises
• **Co-creation**: Turn-by-turn collaborative building
• **Instruction-execution**: User gives command, AI performs, user evaluates
• **Exploration**: Open-ended back-and-forth to discover possibilities
• **Guided workflow**: AI leads the user through a multi-step process

Choose the pattern that matches the task. Don't default to instruction-execution for everything.

Design Artefacts

• Conversation flow diagrams showing turn sequences
• Repair protocol specifications
• Grounding checkpoints mapped to conversation stages
• Turn-taking rules per interaction context