In 2019, Amay Kataria was commissioned to create two news works for the show Future is Here, curated by Dr. Arshiya Lokhandwala. It was an exhibition of 9 emerging Indian artists in the world. The second project he created was Babble - an interactive chat bot operating at the intersection of an emotional companion and a conversation stalker. It has a tendency to overhear conversations in a crowd or be directly confronted by one speaking into the microphone. By using technologies like NLP (natural language processing), it interprets the spoken words and extracts the emotion and keywords from it. Babble uses these elements to visually respond with animated gifs and aurally with an emotional blurb about how it feels.
This work uses open-source creative coding library called P5.js and machine learning tools like Microsoft Text-Analytics APIs, and Cakechat - an open-source emotional generative dialog system to generate the responses.
