The design, production and implementation of a storytelling chatbot Collette Curry, Dr Jim O’Shea and Dr Keeley Crockett What is a chatbot?
Why the Ark Royal?
A chatbot is a computer program that simulates intelligent human conversation. Also known as Conversational Agents. The design & production of an interactive digital storytelling chatbot presented new possibilities, enabling the development & creation of characters with feelings and personalities. Tied in with the National Curriculum, the Ark Royal package was immediately useable within education.
The name holds a wealth of historical facts combined with a rich array of tales that could be produced to support the chatbot memory from the 1500’s to 2011 when the last ship to bear the name went out of service.
The narrator character spoke to the user and told of pirates in 1588.
Methods. Which story? There are many different algorithms available to produce chatbots, using a variety of computer languages, databases and flat text files. The study explored these different algorithms and proposed a method that utilised a database as well as flat text files that were accessed through a browser and then installed locally on the user’s computer. This gave the users ownership of their own storytelling chatbot. The students began to produce their own chatbots by using a provided framework.
Adaptive narrative. The stories were introduced on a website by a speaking avatar chatbot in the guise of a character from the past. The avatar was named ‘The Narrator’.
Do you want to play a game?
The web site. The web interface was built in Flash using Action-script 3. It was implemented using HTML5 and tested on Ubuntu Linux and Windows systems. Using the Festival Text to Speech system, the chatbot was given a voice. During this MSc Computing project, the author took part in trials to synthesize her voice for a future chatbot application.
Evaluation The use of social media allowed students to contribute information, additional maps, alternate endings and plot strategy to the story. Two questionnaires were completed showing that the students benefitted from the Ark Royal experience in a number of ways. 96% of users would use the program often. 99% thought the program worked well. 86% felt confident using the program.
Contact: Collette Curry
[email protected]
Games The system had several games available for users to play in between the storytelling. This helped to increase the vocabulary of the user and increased the knowledge of the chatbot. This encouraged some of the reluctant readers taking part in the study.
The ability to generate narrative is of importance to computer systems that wish to use story effectively for a wide range of contexts ranging from entertainment to training and education. The typical approach for incorporating narrative into a computer system is for system builders to script the narrative features at design time. A central limitation of this prescriptive approach is its lack of flexibility -- such systems cannot adapt the story to the user’s interests, preferences, or abilities. The alternative approach is for the computer systems themselves to generate narrative that is fully adapted to the user at run time. This was the aim of the HMS Ark Royal system. The study is being continued as part of a PhD Computing project. Looking into reminiscence memory aids for dementia sufferers.
Conclusions. Using the Ark Royal package, students took part in creative writing exercises. This work was optically scanned into the chatbot knowledge bank and became part of the available corpus. In this way blocks of text, pages from classics and student work could be added as new storytelling modules. Making the chatbot able to acquire new knowledge. Using Open simulator, a virtual world was constructed which allowed the participant to explore the Elizabethan ship in a simulated world and interact with the chatbot on the ship. Future developments would include more simulations like this for students to explore.
