It was a real pleasure to get some of The Inspection Chamber gang back together again to develop some thinking  – and build a simple testable prototype – around the idea of next-generation smart speakers, combined with emerging AI technologies, offering new ways to develop more healthy and positive conversation and communication skills in the workplace.

The opportunity to work again with audio producer Nicky Birch and sound designer/artist Ben Ringham came through Catherine Chambers at NESTA, who had been developing ideas relating to the concept of ‘Digital Twins‘, one of the research subjects covered under the NESTA Exploration Initiatives programme.

Before the pandemic struck we managed to have one face-to face development meeting, and then we went to work online to script out a working prototype of a ‘conversation game’ that might be used as first step towards working out how one might have a healthy dialogue with one’s ‘digital self’.

Catherine has written a really useful article on Medium, entitled ‘How might voice assistants help us have better conversations?’, that describes well how we went from improvising work-related conversations across Zoom (with the one basic game rule that the words ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ were not be used) to developing a simple interactive sequence using VoiceFlow.

I won’t steal Catherine’s thunder by repeating her article – do follow the link above and give it a read. Just to say, this is a very interesting area of research for any writer seeking to use chatbots and AI to develop authentic character interactions and conversations within the context of a game or an interactive drama. If any other people are developing thoughts in this area and need a writer to help out, you know where to find me.