It’s one of the perks of having been an interactive writer for a fair old time that I still occasionally get invited to join a team that is grappling with the problems of telling stories on new platforms.

This time around I’ve been lucky enough to work with Nicky Birch at Rosina Sound, director/producer Joby Waldman, sound designer Ben Ringham and a gang of super-talented producers, designers and programmers at BBC R&D, led by Henry Cooke, to produce a prototype audio drama that explores the affordances offered by the latest generation of voice-controlled audio devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.

The task has been to come up with an idea for a short interactive audio drama that tests the affordances of the platform, allows the BBC to tease out technical issues associated with developing skills/actions for Echo/Home,  and offers some insights into how stories and drama might best be told in terms of engagement, personality, story/episode length, personalisation, usability, replayability, branching, gameplay etc – i.e. all those issues we always seem to confront when each new content platform hits the market.

Our solution – having workshopped up to half a dozen story ideas – is The Inspection Chamber.

It puts you the listener (or rather the ‘speaker’ or the ‘player’) in the position of being inspected by a couple of scientists, Josef & Kaye, and an AI robot called Dave. These scientists have to identify and categorise what kind of being you are by setting you tests and asking you questions.

If they don’t manage to place you correctly in their Database of Animals, Vegetables and… Everything (D>A>V>E), the scientists will not be able to complete their mission and go home. They themselves will remain trapped forever  in the Inspection Chamber.

This sounds like it could be quite a dark story, but we chose instead to make it comic. Even that choice had to be considered in the context of the research questions we were trying to answer. Is comedy the right genre to attempt first? (Others have started with gumshoe/detective fiction – see BOSCH). Does comedy suit interactivity? What constitutes an interactive joke? 

You can find a lot of information about BBC R&D’s thinking about the smart speakers here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/talking-with-machines.

I’d be very interested in developing more stories and games for these platforms, so get in touch if you fancy collaborating.