The Interactive Show - A Conversational Companion for Young Children and Childcare Assistant for Parents.

Advances in the fields of natural language processing, machine learning and speech recognition have led to the increasing adoption of conversational agents in a variety of domains. However, the use of conversational agents as a childcare assistant for parents of young children has not been realized. We propose the use of conversational agents into children's programs to produce an interactive show, which can be employed as conversational companion for children, and a childcare assistant for parents of young children who have limited access to childcare options. Key features of the interactive show include understanding, responsiveness and maintaining an uninterrupted conversation flow. We argue that having a truly interactive show can engage children for a longer period of time without being distracted, which can give parents some time to attend to their needs in the absence of help.