An Interactive Tour Guide for a Heritage Site

Imagine taking a guided tour of a heritage site. Generally, tour guides have canned routes and stories about the monuments. As humans, we can inform the guide about topics which we are interested in, so as to ensure that we are presented stories which match our interests. Most digital storytelling approaches fail to take into account this aspect of human interaction when presenting stories to a user. In this work, we take on the task of interactive story generation, for a casually captured video-clip of a heritage site tour. We leverage user interaction to improve the relevance of the stories presented to the user. The stories generated vary from user to user, with the stories progressively becoming more aligned with the captured interests, as the number of interactions increase. We condition the stories on visual features from the video, along with the interests of the user. We additionally present a mechanism to generate questions to be posed to a user to gain additional insights into their interests. The efficacy of this work is demonstrated at the Golconda fort, situated in Hyderabad, India.