Bringing together our work in story-listening systems for children and in embodied conversational agents, we are developing a conversational character, Sam, who can act as a peer playmate to children and can create stories with them by sharing physical objects across the real and virtual worlds, and by listening and understanding the child's input.

Recent developments include improving Sam's interactivity using speech recognition and natural language processing, improved models of turn-taking during fantasy play among children, an updated graphics engine, and optimized to run on one computer. Recent testing of the system shows the extent to which this toy engages children in creative and collaborative full-body play.