Synthesizing a Talking Child Avatar to Train Interviewers Working with Maltreated Children

Abstract

When responding to allegations of child sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, Child Protection Service (CPS) workers and police personnel need to elicit detailed and accurate accounts of the abuse to assist in decision-making and prosecution. Current research emphasizes the importance of the interviewer’s ability to follow empirically based guidelines. In doing so, it is essential to implement economical and scientific training courses for interviewers. Due to recent advances in artificial intelligence, we propose to generate a realistic and interactive child avatar, aiming to mimic a child. Our ongoing research involves the integration and interaction of different components with each other, including how to handle the language, auditory, emotional, and visual components of the avatar. This paper presents three subjective studies that investigate and compare various state-of-the-art methods for implementing multiple aspects of the child avatar. The first user study evaluates the whole system and shows that the system is well received by the expert and highlights the importance of its realism. The second user study investigates the emotional component and how it can be integrated with video and audio, and the third user study investigates realism in the auditory and visual components of the avatar created by different methods. The insights and feedback from these studies have contributed to the refined and improved architecture of the child avatar system which we present here.

AI avatar tells you what happened: The first test of using AI-operated children in simulated interviews to train investigative interviewers

“…In this line of studies, the effectiveness of comprehensive training programs that encompass mock interviews with avatars have been examined Benson M. S. and Powell M. B., 2015;Powell et al, 2016), and more recently, long-term training effects were also examined (Brubacher et al, 2021). Baugerud and colleagues have developed interactive virtual reality avatars to train interviewers (Salehi et al, 2022). They have investigated the optimal combination of different components (e.g., visual, auditorial, emotional, and linguistic features of avatars) emphasizing avatar realism with positive feedback from potential end-users.…”

Enhancing questioning skills through child avatar chatbot training with feedback

“… Outline of the system architecture. Green blocks denote the interactive parts, yellow blocks are related to language, blue are related to audio, and pink are related to visualization ( Salehi et al, 2022 , p. 7). …”

“…In our ongoing work, we develop conversational child avatars, combining knowledge from developmental psychology, educational psychology, and advanced technology within AI and real-time systems. Early 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional (virtual reality) versions of child avatars that respond dynamically to trainees’ questions have been developed, and stepwise and component-by-component testing are in progress ( Baugerud et al, 2021 ; Salehi et al, 2022 ; Hassan et al, 2022a , b ). In the current study, we are testing a large generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-3), a language model ( Brown et al, 2020 ), as a child avatar chatbot to use for the training of questioning skills in an interviewing context.…”

Editorial: Technological solutions helping to train specialists' interviewing skills of possible victims and witnesses

“…Subsequently, the efficacy and the value of such online training extends beyond conventional classroom instruction and is well-supported by a body of research, including studies by Benson and Powell ( 2015 ), Powell et al ( 2016 ), and Brubacher et al ( 2022 ). Following this development, additional avatar-based solutions have emerged (Pompedda et al, 2015 ; Haginoya et al, 2021 ), along with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered avatars (Baugerud et al, 2021 ; Salehi et al, 2022 ).…”