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

TL;DR

StoryBuddy is an AI-powered system designed to facilitate interactive storytelling between parents and children, supporting customizable questions and tracking progress to enhance engagement and educational outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, parent-involved AI storytelling system that adapts to diverse educational goals and parental involvement levels, addressing limitations of fully automated approaches.

Findings

Validated usability through user study

Supported configuration of question types and progress tracking

Provided design insights for future parent-AI collaboration tools

Abstract

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.