StoryChat: An Interactive Storytelling System for Engaging with Agent Characters in a Story

Reading storybooks is one of the primary ways to cultivate children’s creativity and enhance their logical thinking. Deep engagement in storylines helps children interpret the content from multiple perspectives, understand the different standpoints of various characters, and thereby encourages comprehensive thinking to refine their logical reasoning. However, in current family education practices, traditional paper-based storytelling methods are still predominantly used to interact with children. This significantly limits children’s engagement with the story, leading to a reliance on parents’ interpretations rather than developing their own insights and independent thinking. Therefore, this study presents StoryChat, an interactive storybooks reading system based on artificial intelligence technology that allows children to engage in dialogue and interaction with agent characters in the story. A user study involving 12 pairs of children aged 5-7 and their parents showed that StoryChat increased children’s interest in reading, promoted children’s empathy cultivation and stimulated deeper thinking. This research provides new ideas for designing interactive storybooks and offers empirical support and design recommendations for the future application of agent characters in children’s storybooks education.