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

Authors
Zheng Zhang,
Ying Xu,
Yanhao Wang,
Bingsheng Yao,
Daniel Ritchie,
Tongshuang Wu,
Mo Yu,
Dakuo Wang,
Toby Jia-Jun Li
Date
Publisher
arXiv
Despite its benefits for children's skill development and parent-child bonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having story-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or challenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made AI generation of questions from stories possible, the fully-automated approach excludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes for child engagement. Informed by need-finding interviews and participatory design (PD) results, we developed StoryBuddy, an AI-enabled system for parents to create interactive storytelling experiences. StoryBuddy's design 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. The PD revealed varied assessment and educational goals of parents, which StoryBuddy addressed by supporting configuring question types and tracking child progress. A user study validated StoryBuddy's usability and suggested design insights for future parent-AI collaboration systems.
Why it matters

Many parents struggle with interactive storytelling due to limited availability or challenges generating appropriate questions. Furthermore, fully automated AI question generation excludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes for child engagement.

Key findings
  • In parent-child storytelling, a user study validated the usability of StoryBuddy, an AI system that allows parents to customize interactive reading experiences.
  • Parents sought flexible involvement during storytelling, balancing desires for parent-child bonding with the ability to minimize their own intervention when busy.
  • Parents reported varied educational and assessment goals for storytelling, which were addressed by allowing them to customize question types and track progress.

Summary drafted with AI from the paper’s abstract and may contain errors. See the full paper for details.

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