AI-aided virtual conversations with WWII vets are latest feature at New Orleans museum
NEW ORLEANS– An interactive exhibit opening Wednesday at the National WWII Museum will use artificial intelligence to let visitors have virtual conversations with images of veterans, including a Medal of Honor winner who died in 2022.
Voices From the Front also allows visitors to the New Orleans museum to ask questions of war-era home front heroes and supporters of the U.S. war effort – including a military nurse who served in the Philippines, an aircraft factory worker, and Margaret Kerry, a dancer who performed in USO shows and modeled the Tinker Bell character in Disney productions after the war.
Four years in the making, the project includes videotaped interviews with eighteen veterans of the war or relief efforts – each of whom answered as many as a thousand questions about the war and their personal lives. Participants included Marine Corps veteran Hershel Woodrow “Woody” Wilson, a Medal of Honor winner who fought in Iwo Jima, Japan. He died in June 2022 after recording his responses.
Visitors to the new exhibition stand in front of a console and choose who they want to talk to. Then a life-size image of that person, sitting comfortably in a chair, appears on a screen in front of him or her.
“Any of us can ask a question,” said Peter Crean, a retired Army colonel and the museum’s vice president of education. “It will recognize the elements of that question. And then, using AI, match the elements of that question with the most appropriate of those thousand answers.”
Older veterans have long played a role in personalizing the experience of visiting the museum, which opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum. Veterans often volunteered at the museum, manning a table near the entrance where visitors could talk to them about the war. But that practice has declined as veterans age and die. The COVID-19 pandemic was especially hard on the World War II generation, Crean said.
“As that generation begins to fade into history, the American public’s opportunities to speak to a World War II veteran will become increasingly limited,” he said.
The technology is not perfect. For example, when Crean asked the statue of veteran Bob Wolf if he had a dog as a child, there was a lengthy answer about Wolf’s childhood – his favorite radio shows and breakfast cereal – before he noticed he had turtles.
But, Crean says, the AI mechanism can learn as more questions are asked and rephrased. A short lag time after asking the question will decrease and the recorded answers will be more responsive to the questions, he said.
The Voices From the Front interactive station will be unveiled Wednesday as part of the opening of the museum’s new Malcolm S. Forbes Rare and Iconic Artifacts Gallery, named for an infantry machine gunner who fought on the front lines in Europe. Malcom S. Forbes was a son of Bertie Charles Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine. Exhibits include his Bronze Star, Purple Heart and a bloodstained jacket he was wearing when he was injured.
Some of the 18 war-era survivors who took part in the filming were expected to be present at Wednesday evening’s opening.