At Chatables we're building a platform to support authors in creating an exciting new type of fictional entertainment. We call this new style of storytelling: Talk to the Storyteller™.
What is Talk to the Storyteller™?
Talk to the Storyteller relies on voice technologies (speech recognition, natural language understanding) to enable a virtual storyteller to ask the listener questions and respond in a meaningful way based on how the listener answers.
A virtual storyteller enabled with speech understanding invites the listener to respond to questions during critical points in the story. This conversational turn-taking makes for a friendly and sometimes introspective experience as the story unfolds.
Talking to the Storyteller is very different from “picking your path“ or “choosing your own ending.” While Talk to the Storyteller invites the listener to interact by speaking, the interaction does not impact the outcome of the fictional narrative. Instead, it deepens the relationship between the listener, the storyteller, and the story.
In many cases the storyteller may be the actual protagonist telling about something he or she experienced firsthand. In other cases the storyteller may be a more traditional narrator, telling a story from a third person perspective.
New Authoring Tools Coming Soon
We’re putting the finishing touches on an authoring platform designed to support Talk to the Storyteller. The web-based writing editor lets authors create stories that include the following components:
Conversational questions
Varied meaningful responses based on a listener’s answer to a question
The ability to remember a listener’s response for use in follow-on questions or later conditional statements or questions
What’s Next
We’ll have announcements coming soon about the availability of our special authoring tool.
We’ll also have more information about the voice app experience we're building for Amazon Alexa. The new experience will showcase stories created by several different authors, all using the powers of Talk to the Storyteller.
Feel free to reach out to either me or Wayne if you’re interested in more information.