CLEVELAND, Tenn. — At Red Clay State Historic Park’s visitor center, a large vertical screen stands out in a room full of glass displays and informational panels, and an avatar on that screen stands at the ready to interact with visitors.
Coinciding with the 27th annual National Trail of Tears Conference and Symposium in Chattanooga in October, Red Clay introduced a new interactive exhibit, consisting of an artificial intelligence avatar, in the personage of a young Cherokee girl, that can teach park visitors about the Cherokee, the Red Clay site and the Trail of Tears. Red Clay is the first Tennessee state park to have the technology, Park Manager Erin Medley said in an interview.
Visitors can interact with the avatar via touch pad, either by selecting preprogrammed questions or by asking their own through speech or text. Having both speech and text options for visitor interaction as well as having the avatar’s responses be subtitled makes the exhibit more accessible for more people, Medley said. Eventually, the avatar will be bilingual, being able to speak Cherokee in addition to English, Medley said.
The avatar is modeled in appearance and voice after a 6-year-old descendant of Rebecca Ketcher Neugin, the last survivor of the Trail of Tears, during which the U.S. forcibly removed the Cherokee people from the Southeast. The avatar’s historical information is based on interviews with Ketcher Neugin. Medley said she wanted the avatar to be female because “we want to tell full stories.”