What is a prompt?
A prompt is the instruction you provide Clarity or any chatbot to obtain the appropriate response or output you desire. You may want a draft of an email, a summary of a document, or suggestions of study questions to help students prepare for a quiz. The prompt is how you relay your requirements to the chatbot.
You can think of the prompt as a recipe - the details you provide to the chatbot are the list of ingredients and cooking instructions.
However, the ingredients alone don’t determine the merit of the meal – the quality of those ingredients, and how they are used, directly impact the excellence of the result. Prompts work the same way – quality prompts produce quality responses. A quality prompt requires clear, specific instructions to get the best results. By following a few core principles, you can significantly improve the quality, relevance, and usefulness of the chatbot’s responses.
How would you like Clarity to respond?
One way to write an effective prompt is to break the prompt down into the following components:
Goal: What response do you want from the chatbot?
Context: Why do you need it and who is involved?
Source: Are there sources of information that the chatbot should include, or an example it should follow?
Expectations: How should the chatbot respond to best meet your expectations?
Sample prompt:
Goal: Help drafting an email.
Context: You had a lot of people apply for your fellowship program and you cannot accept them all.
Source: If the chatbot supports file uploads, you might upload a sample email for the chatbot to follow, or paste those details into your prompt.
Expectation: The email should express gratitude for the applicant’s interest and should have a kind tone.
PROMPT: “Our department recently received an overwhelming number of applications for our upcoming fellowship program. However, we cannot accept everyone. Please help me draft an email to send to those people who were not accepted. The email should express gratitude for their interest and should have a kind tone. Please use the email I have uploaded to this chat as a reference for your response.”
Other things to consider:
State your specific role when that information is relevant to the response you want to receive.
EXAMPLE: “I am a professor at Yale University and am currently brainstorming ideas for a lesson plan on [TOPIC]. Will you please assist me in generating class exercises for first year students?”
Provide specifics about how you would like the response formatted:
- “Provide 5 bullet points”
- “Write a 200-word summary”
- “Create a step-by-step process”
Provide enough context:
- Explain the background situation
- Mention your audience or purpose
- Include any constraints or requirements
Iterate and revise:
If the first response from the chatbot isn’t perfect, you can pose follow-up questions or ask for specific changes like “Can you make the tone more formal?” or “That’s a good start, but can you focus more on [Specific Aspect]?”
Pay attention to the kinds of revisions you routinely ask of the chatbot because this will also help you improve the initial prompts you enter.