Chat Creatures: AI Kiosk Platform

Overview

Chat Creatures is an AI voice kiosk platform I built at Interactive Knowledge. Museums, festivals, and public venues deploy themed AI characters that visitors can talk to using natural speech. The platform has two codebases: a React frontend kiosk application that I built, and a Drupal 11 headless CMS that manages character personas and configuration.

Frontend Kiosk (React + Vite)

I built the frontend kiosk application from scratch and remain the primary developer, responsible for 167 of 196 commits (85%). A colleague contributed the remaining 15%, including some character theming and animation work.

The kiosk handles speech recognition via the Web Speech API, conversation management through OpenAI GPT-4o-mini with tool calling, and text-to-speech output through Google Cloud TTS or ElevenLabs depending on the deployment. Each character loads its persona configuration from the CMS at runtime.

In December 2025, I did a major refactor to support CMS-driven persona creation. The goal was zero-code character deployment: define a persona in Drupal, and the kiosk picks it up automatically. This involved replacing 16 useState calls with 3 Zustand stores, extracting custom hooks for chat handling, speech recognition, and audio playback, and building a TTSServiceFactory that abstracts across TTS providers. Chatbot.tsx went from 1,017 lines to 358. I added 147 Vitest tests during the refactor.

CMS Backend (Drupal 11)

The Drupal backend was built by the rest of the team on the IK upstream. I contributed 8 commits focused on the Drupal 11 upgrade, persona theming infrastructure (mapping 44 Drupal fields to 19 CSS variables for CMS-driven styling), and config sync.

Deployments

• Geary the Guide: EarlyWorks Children's Museum, Huntsville, AL. A gear-themed guide for kids. Tiered language modes adjust complexity based on visitor age. First production deployment.
• Athena and Apollo, The Oracles: LEAF Festival, Black Mountain, NC. A pair of alien characters inside 12-foot inflatable art installations, differentiated by persona configuration.
• Humphrey the Water Thrifty Camel: City of Cedar Park, TX. A water conservation mascot that looks up local watering schedules using function calling. Uses Google Cloud TTS.