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StoryBuddy: A Human-AI Collaborative Chatbot for Parent-Child Interactive Storytelling with Flexible Parental Involvement

130 Citations2022
Zheng Zhang, Ying Xu, Yanhao Wang

StoryBuddy is an AI-enabled system for parents to create interactive storytelling experiences and highlighted the need for accommodating dynamic user needs between the desire for parent involvement and parent-child bonding and the goal of minimizing parent intervention when busy.

Abstract

Despite its benefits for children's skill development and parent-child\nbonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having\nstory-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or\nchallenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made\nAI generation of questions from stories possible, the fully-automated approach\nexcludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes\nfor child engagement. Informed by need-finding interviews and participatory\ndesign (PD) results, we developed StoryBuddy, an AI-enabled system for parents\nto create interactive storytelling experiences. StoryBuddy's design highlighted\nthe need for accommodating dynamic user needs between the desire for parent\ninvolvement and parent-child bonding and the goal of minimizing parent\nintervention when busy. The PD revealed varied assessment and educational goals\nof parents, which StoryBuddy addressed by supporting configuring question types\nand tracking child progress. A user study validated StoryBuddy's usability and\nsuggested design insights for future parent-AI collaboration systems.\n