TO WRITE YOUR EMAILS FRAMING AI CHATBOTS FRAMING AI CHATBOTS

Of the many exciting aspects of the recent innovations in generative AI chatbots (i.e. Google Bard) the potential to save teachers time on administrative tasks is near the top. Writing emails is one of those tasks that tends to take up disproportionate amounts of time for teachers whose time could be better spent planning lessons and assessing student work (which AI can help with too, but that is for another article).

Simply asking Google Bard to write an email on a certain topic is already helpful, but often requires a lot of editing to get the email to the point where it feels authentic and usable. Let’s face it, a lot of Google Bard’s responses sound a little… robotic.

You can shortcut this editing for voice and style by framing your request in such a way that the AI chatbot produces writing in your own voice and style (or that of another author you might be studying)

AI expert, Rachel Woods, suggests the following prompt to produce a “voice paragraph” that you can continue to provide with your AI chatbot prompts whenever you’d like the output to sound like it was written by you. The following prompt can be copied and pasted into Google Bard:

You are an AI system that has been trained to analyse the below text for style, voice, and tone then use NLP to create a voice paragraph. A voice paragraph prompts a future AI system to write in that same style of voice and tone. here is the input text:"

Saving Your Prompt

Staying organised with your AI prompts is going to be one of the main factors in how helpful and time-saving these tools will be You might decide to save this NLP paragraph in Google Keep, which can be easily accessed in the side-bar of most Google Workspace tools

Then you provide Bard with an email that you’ve written and you feel accurately reflects your voice and writing style.

What the chatbot produces is your NLP (natural language processing) paragraph and should be bookmarked or saved in a place that can be quickly and easily accessed for future prompting This paragraph contains the style and text that will enable a generative chatbot like Bard to write in a style that sounds more like you

Or you might consider trying a tool like PromptBox, a “freemium” Google Chrome extension that allows you to not only organise and share your AI prompts, but also create templates with variables so that your prompts are easy to continually re-use

Now that you have your voice paragraph saved, you are ready to start prompting Bard to write your emails for you When I am writing AI prompts, I use a modified version of Dan Fitpatrick’s P.R.E.P model that goes as follows:

Prompt Role Example Parameters

(including voice style)

Example

Framing Email Prompts Using Your Voice Paragraph P R E P

Here is what that would like like in this email example:

Prompt

You are going to write an email home to a student's parent discussing the issues with their student continually being late to class.

Role

Imagine you are a 7th grade teacher whose NLP voice paragraph is as follows: "Informal and conversational, it uses contradictions and colloquialisms and personal pronouns to create a sense of familiarity and rapport. The author also uses humor."

This is an example of an email you've written that I want you to use as a model: "I'm writing to you today to share some information about tomorrow's meeting. As I mentioned before, I'm trying to avoid unnecessary meetings, so I've put together a list of things for you to read ahead of time. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them to the collaboration agenda Today, a group of us met to fine-tune our weekly tasks. We also decided to keep the "Learning Coach Checks" that we've been using. These are little directions at the bottom of your Google Classroom assignments that tell learning coaches how to determine whether their students have completed the assignment. To get the red push pin emoji, right-click your mouse and select "Emoji keyboard " Please add a "Learning Coach Check" to all of your asynchronous assignments. If you could also "like" or "thumbs up" this email to let me know you've read it, that would be great I'm always happy to answer questions, so please don't hesitate to reach out of you need anything. See you tomorrow! 8am in room 104 or 105 (depending on where all those laptops end up) "

Parameters

The email should sandwich the critiques about the student's lateness with compliments about the student's creativity and participation in class

Based on the updated prompt, here is the updated email