AiC Episode 65

In this episode, Teri welcomes Amy Stapleton, the founder, and CEO of Tellables, a company that excels in creating interactive storytelling for voice assistants and robots.

Welcome, Amy Stapleton!

Amy has been an IT professional for many years and her last stint was as IT manager at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. She retired early to focus on voice technology, specifically in storytelling, which led her to specialize in natural language and conversation, and designing interactive story experiences and games for talking voice assistants and conversational robots.

Amy comes on the show to talk to us about her new skill, “My Box of Chocolates”, and to explain how chocolates in this skill represent different stories. It’s a new type of interactive storytelling where we can have discussions with Alexa about what you’re listening to. The skill is available in Canada and Amy is actually looking for authors to participate in the story making process.

Her First Skills and Starting Tellables

  • When Jibo (the social robot) was launched, it made Amy realize that people wanted to hear stories told by robots and voice assistants because they would consider them to be like characters in their home.
  • Her first storytelling Alexa skill was called “Listening Comprehension Practice” which had stories that were followed by some yes or no questions. The skill was more directed at children because they could listen to the stories and then test out their understanding of the content of the story by answering the questions.
  • The next skill they created was “Tricky Genie” and it became very popular. It’s more of a story game where Alexa tells a quick little anecdote about one or more characters who get themselves into some kind of predicament, and a genie pops up holding 3 sacks, and then the player has two chances to find the sack with the right solution.
  • They created other skills that were like Tricky Genie, but Amy wanted to move more into something that was based on conversational storytelling where people could enjoy stories and be able to have conversations with Alexa about the stories.
  • They now have a content management system which allows an author to add a lot of additional content to a skill without having to republish the skill. They have opened up the system so that other authors can submit content for Tellables to use and publish as part of their live skills. The first skill where they implemented that is “My Box of Chocolates”

Interactive Storytelling with Amy Stapleton of Tellables

Conversational Storytelling

  • It’s based on the idea of a voice assistant telling someone a story. In the case of My Box of Chocolates, one of Tellables’ virtual chocolatiers tells a story through the smart speaker. The user, therefore, engages with a personality, unlike when listening to a streaming audiobook.
  • After someone hears one of the stories in My Box of Chocolates, Alexa (who is listening to the story with the person), will make a comment about what she thinks of the story, then she will ask the listener a question that the listener can respond to in a number of ways. Then based on the response, Alexa will make an appropriate follow-on response which is one level deep. Tellables is working on developing the skill farther so that people can have multi-turn conversations with Alexa about the story.

My Box of Chocolates

  • The basic concept of the skill is that Tellables has created a publishing platform where authors who like to write short stories can submit the stories to Tellables to publish.
  • Every month, Tellables publishes a virtual box of twelve candies that are chocolates, each representing a different story. People can go to the Tellables website to see an image of each chocolate and what it represents. Every month Tellables come out with a new assortment, but people can still go back to the older stories if they want to.
  • The bots that tell the stories are called Chocolatiers. So far they have 4 chocolatiers (Coco, Brandon, Archie, and Opal) with distinct personalities and different synthetic voices. Each voice is associated with a specific character that has a personality and a back story. Each character has an image.
  • For those who want to contribute their stories, they have to be a maximum of 275 words long and fit within the personalities of any of the 4 chocolatiers in My Box of Chocolates.

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