To complement the DNA tests Ancestry was offering as part of its new health product, the company wanted a feature to allow users to collect information about their family health history. The idea was that if, say, the user's mom had had breast cancer, there would be a way for the user to understand and visualize that their risk of breast cancer is higher because of that family history — regardless of whether their DNA test found a variant linked to increased risk of breast cancer. As you can tell, communicating it all got complicated. To help explain things clearly, the company decided to try out a chatbot. The ask was just that: make a chatbot — and, of course, make it friendly but not too friendly, make it clinical but not too clinical, make it at as concise and unobtrusive as possible. So we started from scratch. I built the logic for a retrieval-based chatbot response by response, writing the scripts as I went, regularly running it by medical experts to ensure it was saying basically what they would they say to an IRL patient, and laying it out clearly enough that engineers could on the other side of the world could build it.