Maaike Groenewege

Maaike Groenewege began her content career in technical communication. She is now a leading voice in conversation design for AI.

Maaike draws on her technical writing background in her conversational AI practice, having observed that whether you're writing for humans or designing prompts for LLMs, you have to truly understand your audience and consistently provide clear and specific instructions.

We talked about:

her work over the past couple of years as a prompt designer
how the instruction design principles from her days in technical writing and technical communication prepared her for her current role
how her early exposure to help desk duties prepared her for the many question-answering responsibilities in her current role
how her writing skills, her critical approach to generative AI, and her love of technology combine to give her a unique perspective on conversational gen AI content
how retrieval-augmented generation drawing on high-quality content datasets can help set a base level of knowledge for LLMs
her opinion that conversational chatbots are a transitory stage on the way to transactional chatbots that can provide self-service problem-solving
the workflow for incorporating retrieval-augmented generation into LLMs
the similar meaning of the concept of "chunking" in technical communication and LLMs
the differences between how LLMs process language and how humans read - and the implications of this for prompt design and engineering
the emerging structure for prompts: assigning a role, describing the task, providing a context
the differences between conversational prompting, prompt design, and prompt engineering
how she works with her engineering partners
the difference between the logical inference that knowledge graphs do and the statistical inference that LLMs use
how she keeps up with the rapidly changing developments in her field
her invention: ALIs, application language interfaces
how she uses ChatGPT in voice mode to capture and summarize her thoughts when she's out for a walk
her prediction that "the future is bright for those who know how to write"

Maaike's bio
Maaike Groenewege is a conversation design lead, linguist and prompt designer with her boutique consultancy firm Convocat BV. She coaches both starting and more experienced conversational teams in optimising their conversation design practise, NLU analyses and team communication. Her main focus right now is on how LLMs can benefit enterprise conversational AI. Maaike is the founder of www.convo.club, an online community for more than 700 conversation designers.
Connect with Maaike online

Convoclub
LinkedIn

Connect with Maaike at these events

European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit, Edinburgh, March 12-14, 2024
UX Copenhagen, March 20-21, 2024
Unparsed Conference London, June 17-19, 2024

Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/3qxxb18BqFM
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 20. A false dichotomy has arisen in the AI world between conversational prompting in chatbot interfaces and prompt engineering under the hood. Maaike Groenewege works in the middle ground, in a role she calls "prompt design." She also draws on practices from her background in technical communication, after observing that whether you're writing for humans or designing prompts for LLMs, you have to truly understand your audience and always provide clear and specific instructions.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 20 of the Content + AI podcast. I am super delighted today to welcome to the show Maaike Groenewege. Maaike is ... Well, she's a principal at Convocat, her company, and she's an actual genuine, prompt engineer. So, Maaike, welcome. Tell the folks more about what it's like being a prompt engineer at Convocat.

Maaike: