Promoting Transparent and Consistent Frameworks for Interactive Digital Testimonies: A Case Study on Preserving Zilli Schmidt’s Story

Abstract

Interactive Digital Testimonies (IDTs) combine digital archives of purpose-made recordings, conversational agents, and immersive display technology to preserve and recreate interactive conversations with contemporary witnesses in a lifelike manner. IDTs represent a specific subcategory of (Embodied) Conversational Agents (ECAs) due to the constraint of not including AI-generated or otherwise synthetic responses or actions. While numerous IDTs have been developed over the last few years, the descriptions of these systems and their respective evaluations frequently lack consistency and transparency, which has led to considerable heterogeneity and a lack of comparability. To counteract these developments, we present the IDT of Holocaust survivor and member of the German-speaking Romani community Zilli Schmidt, which we developed since 2021. We transparently share both content-related and technical features of this IDT.