Overview:

What is the future of of Conversational User Interface that can achieves human-computer symbiosis?

Since the beginning, oral tradition has been an important part of human history. it is how we pass down knowledge and wisdom through the ages. For this project, we focus on the storytelling between parents and child. From our research, storytelling to young children has a strong influence in how a child develops. However, with the demand of modern life, it is becoming a burden to find the time to tell children bedtime stories. On top of that, while some parents feel comfortable telling stories and enjoys doing so, other dread this nightly routine. While a child can listen to the same story repeatedly, adults often find it boring to do so.

Luna is a two-part, context away system that helps dynamically generates new stories based on a child's daily routine. The first part is a wearable token, designed to be attached to a child all day. It picks up various key words in a child's day, intelligently select what is relevant. At the end of the day, when the token is docked to the home projector unit, a unique story is synthesized, and can be read by the parent while simple audio and visual additions are presented.

10 weeks team project with Hector Mejia, Eduardo Ferreira, and Akansha Aggarwal, collaboration with MIcrosoft, Spring 2016.

Solution and functionality

- Context aware, pick up auditory cues and highlights throughout the day.

- Based on daily context, dynamically, dynamically generates.

Luna is a two-part, context away system that helps dynamically generates new stories based on a child's daily routine. The first part is a wearable token, designed to be attached to a child all day. It picks up various key words as a child goes about his or her day, and intelligently select what is relevant. At the end of the day, when the token is docked to the home projector base unit, the base will, use the key words as highlights and synthesize a new custom story for the child. The base then provide a story for the parent to tell while projecting simple visual and audio aids to supplement the story.

Process

This project began with ethnographic research of reading and books. We visited multiple libraries, bookstores, 2nd hand store, and the book depository. We ended up with data from a selections of sites, along with the people associated with each site.

The next step was taking all the observations and interviews and start to drawing connections and locating and trends. We look at the relationships between the people, the various sites, and different form of media. We began to see how each elements were connected to each other, where the stronger connections are. The information distilled allowed us to conduct workshops to further explore the connections between media, people, and locations.

We built various prototypes as our tools where we conducted further workshops. We had participants from writers to everyday readers to former librarians. During these co-creation workshops, we observed how the various media formats that we use to convey information formed relationships with our participants, and what is their notion of a book and how they envision how stories are told.

With all we're learned, we settled on our idea of a storytelling assistant. We start to mock up how this assistant functions: Who is the stakeholder? How do you input contest? How is the materials presented. We mocked up various ideas such how the interaction flows between parents, child, and device. We tested if it should be audio only or should be supplemented by imagery. We decided we have two parts to the device, the wearable token and the base station. Then we tried various ways of them interacting together.

Luna is our final concept for implementing conversational user interface, in this case focusing on the storytelling relationship between parents and child. It is a device that required training and it improves over time. In a way, the device can "grow" along with the child. By making it easier for parents during those storytelling sessions with their child, we want to strengthen the connection between parents and child.