interactive storytelling with question answering provides children with significant developmental
benefits and enhances parent-child relationships however leading an effective storytelling session
is not easy for parents they need to come up with appropriate questions
including follow-up questions although there are digital systems trying to assist with interactive
storytelling they only support a limited set of books that are processed manually
while recent technological advances made a generation of questions about
story plots for any story possible the fully automated approach excludes parent involvement
disregards educational goals and under-optimizes child engagement we present story buddy a new
system that allows parents to collaborate with ai in creating storytelling experiences with
interactive questioning answering storybuddy has the following innovative features
first storybuddy enables personalized automatic question generation for any storybooks
given the story content story buddy can generate contextual question answer pairs for each section
story buddy allows parents to set preferences of question types to accommodate different learning
goals second story buddy has two distinct modes for supporting both parent presence and absent
situations the design of these two modes was informed by participatory design sessions with
parents who identify the support for flexible parent involvement as a key design goal for story
buddy in the parent AI co-reading mode where the parent is present story buddy assists the parent
with storytelling by identifying opportunities for asking questions recommending questions to
ask generating follow-up questions and tracking the progress and performance of the child
parent is the primary storyteller the child can also occasionally engage with a conversational bot
directly by speech so that the storytelling session is more entertaining and engaging
in this mode it is crucial that story buddy does not displace or lessen the parent's role
preserving the parent-child relationship building aspect of storytelling that both parents and
children treasure in the automated bot reading mode where the parent is absent story buddy allows
the parent to select a book preview the generated questions select the ones to use and customize the
bot child interaction in advance after the parent configuration is finished story buddy is able to
read the book three bears facilitate interactive question answering through a conversational bot
without the parents intervention third story buddy provides a dashboard that
allows parents to assess children's performance and track children's question answering progress
the dashboard can show the child's question answering history displaying the accuracy and the
question type distribution for each storytelling session parents can also check the child's weekly
process and tailor the statistics to a particular question type a user study with 12 pairs of
parents and children aged from three to eight found that storybody is useful helpful and likable
through the design implementation and study of story buddy we also discussed its implications
for designing for partial automation in parent collaboration supporting flexibility in parental
involvement and determining the roles of the ai system in parent-child interaction