Say C**** No More: Post-Pandemic Rehabilitation Bot That Suggests Topics to Talk About

2021


C**** is a bot that intervenes in your conversations. It butts in when it hears you mention the big C in conversation. Can be turned on and off (for genuine important information).



This project was created as a three-day group assignment for the Applications class at ITP — to design a product for the post-pandemic times.  

Roles

Idea and brainstorming by group H!
Coding & Prototyping by Yona Ngo,
Presentation by Rajshree Saraf,
Presented by Yonatan Rozin, Pauline Ceraulo, Rajshree Saraf and Yona Ngo.

Background

C**** is spreading at an accelerating rate — it’s everywhere. Talking about C**** is becoming the new talking about the weather.

“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”  - Oscar Wilde

While some people have always been socially awkward, for some it’s circumstantial.

Study shows, prolonged isolation from society leads to an increase in social anxiety. We can lose our social skills with lack of practice. We forget how to act around people  - we don’t know what to say.

If you think your social interactions have become clumsier since covid - you are not alone. Covid has made things bad even for the most social of us. Not getting the full range of human interactions is affecting us psychologically and it’s altering the way we respond in social situations. So we turn to talking about C****. As a result, we’re losing potential meaningful connections.

How It Works

The C**** bot was created with p5.speech and an array of topics that the bot suggests if it detects the words “COVID”, “Coronavirus” or “pandemic”.

Tools & Process

For the first prototype we used p5 and p5.speech. We also played around with Google Teachable Machine to see, whether it would give better results.

You can try the prototype yourself here. 

Thank Thank Thank

Group H! <3 It was fun working with all of you.