Time Travelers

Using Watson Assistant, you can have the best guide of the museum in your hand. While moving through the museum rooms, the application will indicate the proximity of the interactive pieces and encourage you to have a conversation with them. The piece's interaction was based on audio and voice in Spanish and English.

Mobile and web applications

"Time travelers" a project that uses IBM Watson technology, makes possible a new way to access knowledge and relate to history and art.

Interacting with The sun Stone trough "Time travelers" app.

You can have the best experience at the Anthropology Museum with the best guide in your hand; through the mobile application and IBM Watson assistant, you can interact directly with selected pieces of prehispanic art and go deep into the Mayan and Mexica cultures.

My role in the project

My job as UX Designer was to re-design the mobile application interaction and how visitors of the museum will use it to interact directly with the pieces at the museum. Also, user experience for the web application, where we collected all the new questions visitors can ask.

In this project, I designed the UI of the mobile and web applications according to the branding proposed by the IBM marketing team.

I also collaborated as Watson Assistant Trainer on a piece in Spanish and English, created the dialog and chit-chat, and corrected phonetics in both languages. With this experience, I coached and reviewed the training and dialog of other pieces.

Constraints, processes, and activities

We developed the first phase of this project to celebrate the 90 years of IBM in Mexico City; months later, we re-designed the experience to improve some things based on user feedback.

Mobile application - Re-designed to reflect the branding of time travelers.

To begin the second phase, we had to provide information and a dialogue to the virtual assistant; for this, we created a web application that allows users to communicate with Watson. We wanted to create many forms of asking, each with different intents, and curate them with the museum's experts. This web application allows the IBM Mexico Community and a selected group of people from the museum to ask about the pieces and relevant information. This activity helped achieve the goal, and we took this information to create the conversation and train Watson.

Training Web application - Chat about Moctezuma’s Headdress.

In the first version of the mobile application, we used beacons to indicate proximity. With this comes another challenge we faced: you can interact with the nearest piece automatically, but at some points of the room, two pieces or more were in the same proximity causing jumps between pieces when you were talking to them and causing confusion for the visitors. We solved this by adding a chat bubble that shows the nearby pieces in the room. You can then select what piece you want to learn more about.

Most of the pieces are part of the Mayan and Mexica rooms of the National Museum of Anthropology (MNA); we have a phonetic challenge here: we use text-to-speech and speech-to-text services in Spanish and English, but the pronunciation of the words is different in both languages. We modified some words of text to speech to have Watson pronounce them correctly.

This exposition was on display for six months at the museum in Mexico City.