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How was that story?An AI system for talking about picture book impressions 
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Dialogues about picture books are known to enhance children’s interest in reading and support their language development. However, parents around them cannot always secure sufficient time for such interactions. To address this issue, we are developing a dialogue AI system, “PitarieChat,” that enables children to discuss their impressions of picture books. By using a large-scale picture book and children’s book corpus constructed by NTT, we achieved empathetic dialogue that elicits children’s impressions and enhances their motivation to read. Furthermore, by adopting tsuzumi 2 for the dialogue engine, the system enables natural conversations grounded in the attributes of the robot and the user, as well as the content of the picture books. In future work, we aim to develop personalization methods based on children’s age and individual characteristics, as well as dialogue control techniques to realize a conversational AI that enables each child to enjoyably develop their thinking and expressive abilities.
[1] NTT West, Inc., “Exhibiting an AI-powered system at the Okinawa Prefectural Library to support new encounters with picture books — Toward fostering reading habits among local children —,” 2025, https://www.ntt-west.co.jp/newscms/okinawa/14861/1_20251024.pdf (in Japanese).
[2] Mynavi News, “NTT West, Inc. exhibits AI reading impression dialogue system “PitarieChat” in Okinawa,” https://news.mynavi.jp/article/20251107-3624023/ (in Japanese).
Yuya Chiba, Interaction Research Group, Innovative Communication Laboratory