Chatbots and New Audience Opportunities for Museums and Heritage Organisations

Abstract

This paper explores how chatbots can offer opportunities for museums and galleries in engaging their audiences through recent developments, and through a case study approach focusing on the design and implementation of an audience development pilot in Milan involving four historic house museums (Case Museo di Milano). The pilot aimed to find new and interesting ways to engage teenagers in visiting these museums through visualising narrative using a convergence of chatbot technology and gamification.

Comunicación y educación en los museos en el contexto español. La encrucijada comunicativa

“…De esta forma, la mayor aceptación de los recursos web por parte del público adulto frente al joven puede deberse a la falta de adaptabilidad de los museos estudiados a las nuevas formas de consumo cultural. Por tanto, dichos porcentajes reflejarían que la Generación Z (nacidos entre 1994 y 2010) espera que la tecnología digital les facilite el acceso a los museos y complemente su visita (chatbots) a través de su móvil (Santos, 2019;Boiano et al, 2018). Por su parte, la Generación Net, o generación de natos digitales, se caracteriza por haber sido educada en un periodo de amplia penetración de medios y gran acceso a las tecnologías digitales (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005).…”

Participatory Innovation and Prototyping in the Cultural Sector: A case study

“…One can use existing Messenger platforms like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp, with a predefined script from which they can copy and paste the answers. The authors have tested this feature while developing the Milan House Museum chatbots (Boiano et al 2018) with good results.…”

Can Heritage Bots Thrive? Toward Future Engagement in Cultural Heritage

“…The museum's aim with the bot is to attract new audiences, especially local young people (Boiano 2017; Boiano et al 2018). Among other things, evaluation results suggest that the game is highly entertaining and that participants found it useful as a learning tool, especially as a group experience rather than using it on their own (Boiano et al 2018).…”

“…The museum's aim with the bot is to attract new audiences, especially local young people (Boiano 2017; Boiano et al 2018). Among other things, evaluation results suggest that the game is highly entertaining and that participants found it useful as a learning tool, especially as a group experience rather than using it on their own (Boiano et al 2018). Hence, a takeaway lesson from these findings might be that most info bots are unlikely to be very effective, because they provide little to no real participation opportunities: they typically do not encourage user/visitor collaboration, which has proved a significant element in the success of the Di Casa in casa adventour bot.…”