Natural Language Al-Powered Smart UI

Looking for real-world AI examples is a challenge and part of this challenge comes from Generative AI (GenAI) news dominating the media. It feels like every AI demo involves chatting with GenAl to produce content. The obligatory chat completion demo has started to become the to-do list of AI demo apps, and, to make matters worse, it's selling AI short.

- 

GenAls rely on large language models (LLMs), which are the brain behind natural language processing tasks. In this article, I'll explore the opportunities presented by LLMS using a real-world research-and-development experiment. This experiment is part of on-going research into AI-enabled user interface components (aka .NET Smart Components) by Progress Software and Microsoft.

Solving Problems for the User

Currently, there are experimental Smart UI Components created by Microsoft (www.http://github.​com/dotnet/ smartcomponents) and third-party component vendors.

These components exist across multiple .NET application models including: ASP.NET, Blazor, WinForms, .NET MAUI, and more. Smart Components use aspects of AI capabilities to enhance the user experience (UX) by adding new features or making existing features easier to use. This approach is an evolutionary one, as the components aren't novel but rather augmented. This allows users to continue using concepts they're familiar with rather than completely replacing the UI. In addition to evolving the UX gradually, it allows UI developers and designers to incrementally update applications and avoid complete rewrites.

Smart AI Search is one example of a Smart Component implementation (https://demos.telerik.​com/blazor-ui/ blazorlab/grid-smart-ai-search). Using text-to-vector embedding and vector search allows users to query by relationship in addition to verbatim text search. When applied to a UI, smart search can be added to drop-down boxes, auto-complete boxes, and generic search bars. As shown in Figure 1, when the user searches for milk, the results contain dairy and cheese. These are UIs that already implement search and are further enhanced by AI to enable results based on context.