Towards an AI-driven talking avatar in virtual reality for investigative interviews of children

Artificial intelligence (AI) and gaming systems have advanced to the stage where the current models and technologies can be used to address real-world problems. The development of such systems comes with different challenges, e.g., most of them related to system performance, complexity and user testing. Using a virtual reality (VR) environment, we have designed and developed a game-like system aiming to mimic an abused child that can help to assist police and child protection service (CPS) personnel in interview training of maltreated children. Current research in this area points to the poor quality of conducted interviews, and emphasises the need for better training methods. Information obtained in these interviews is the core piece of evidence in the prosecution process. We utilised advanced dialogue models, talking visual avatars, and VR to build a virtual child avatar that can interact with users. We discuss our proposed architecture and the performance of the developed child avatar prototype, and we present the results from the user study conducted with CPS personnel. The user study investigates the users' perceived quality of experience (QoE) and their learning effects. Our study confirms that such a gaming system can increase the knowledge and skills of the users. We also benchmark and discuss the system performance aspects of the child avatar. Our results show that the proposed prototype works well in practice and is well received by the interview experts.