All patternsIdentifiers
Name

Name

How do we refer to the AI?

What do we call this thing?

Is it a bot? AI? ChatGPT? An Agent? Something else?

Users deserve to know what or who they are interacting with. In environments where a user is knowingly interacting with AI, this may not be as critical. However, consider being onboarded into a new company, and you learn you are interacting with a third-party AI agent, not someone on your team. Or, perhaps you are sharing personal information in a therapy session and you realize the "person" on the other end is AI.

This is a ambiguous pattern. We should expect to see companies play around with proprietary names, possibly keeping terms like AI associated with the bot to make it clear who the person is. For example, Intercom has named their AI Fin, though they always include a disclosure badge to make it clear the user is interacting with an AI bot.

Here are a few other examples in the wild today:

  • Klarna: AI Assistant (Ask our AI assistant)
  • Notion: AI (Ask AI)
  • Leena: Leena.ai
  • Github: Copilot (Ask copilot)As naming conventions sort themselves out, a smaller pattern is emerging that adds a badge to the AI or the interface to making it clear when you are interacting with AI versus a human.

Currently this pattern is converging around four approaches:

  1. AI as a persona: Give the AI a name
    • Intercom: Fin
    • Character.ai: Gives each character a name (Ask Socrates)
    • Salesforce: Einstein
  2. AI as the company: Use the company's name
    • Jasper: Jasper (Ask Jasper)‍
    • ChatGPT: ChatGPT (Ask ChatGPT)‍
    • Leena: Leena.ai
  3. ‍AI as an entity: Give the AI a generic term, like CoPilot or Assistant‍
    • Klarna: AI Assistant (Ask our AI assistant)‍
    • Github: Copilot‍
    • Zapier: Copilot‍
  4. AI as a technology: 
    • Notion: AI (Ask AI)

Details and variations

There are no set conventions for this pattern. Choose a name that is authentic to your brand and relevant to the product and experience you are building. No matter which name you choose, use badges and other indicators to make it clear to the user when they are interacting with AI.

Considerations

Positives

Brand association
There is no doubt that assistances like Siri and Alexa have become synonymous with their companies. Giving a character to your AI can make it feel more inviting while creating an emotional connection for consumers, helping to build your brand.

AI recognition
Names can help users recognize whether they are speaking. Using iconography, a personal name, and other identifiers can help users understand the difference between talking with a bot and a human. This could make the handoff of conversations from bot to human feel more natural for users, and give them cues for how to interact.

Potential risks

Uncanny Valley
Human-like names can be confusing. Avoid situations where a user would not know if they are talking to a bot or a human by adding other cues into the interface.

Use when:
Referring to the AI in copy or other content, or contributing to the user's sense of its personality.
Related patterns:
Disclosure
Clearly mark content and interactions guided or delivered by AI
Symbols
Images that represent the AI within the interface

Examples

Leena adds a "Powered by AI" indicator at the bottom of conversations
Despite the highly personalized nature of Character.ai, all characters have a c.ai badge next to their messages to avoid confusion
Intercom adds an AI badge under Fin's name to make it clear, and also adds an indicator on the message itself
When starting a new conversation with Github's Copilot, the bot begins by reminding the user that it is AI
Github also includes reminders about AI when interacting with the Copilot directly through the GUI
Open text interfaces that don't have a parallel in the "real world" often don't have a badge
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