The idea of creating "Bot and I" started to develop in my mind one particular day when my daughter Abigail was extremely bored.
"Let's write a story together!", I offered. I didn't have any experience in writing stories, and so did Abigail. After all she was only 5 years old. But I was experienced in using tools that can generate stories automatically for us, so I knew we can write the story quickly and easily.
Abigail is a fan of princesses and of Disney stories, and she loves Rapunzel, the long haired princess that was locked in a tower by an evil witch. So it happened that on that afternoon Abigail and I sat down to write "Rapunzel and Eugene's New Adventures". Eugene, if you didn't know is the charming prince in Disney's version of the story.
The idea turned out to be successful. Abagail was happy to create the story with me for a while, and we also added pictures we generated to each part of the story. She was proud of the result, and as a bonus we got compliments from the family when we shared it.
Something was still missing, at least for me. As a start, the story was written by its own. We chose the topic, but someone else wrote it for us. We could change the direction by giving feedback, and if we really didn't like something we asked to remove that from the story. But still, it wasn't a creative process, it was more like story engineering- a mechanical or technical process.
And this wasn't the only problem. These tools are built to be nice and polite, and restricted. These limitations led our story to be monotonous and not very exciting, while a good human creation is emotional, exciting, surprising and powerful. These limitations are there for good reasons. I don't think I'd let my kids interact with these tools if they were completely unrestrained.
Another problem, and the last I'll describe here was that the story was too "generic". As humans each of us has a unique inner world, views and thoughts and our own way of understanding reality and the world around us. We have a need for self-expression. It's probably true that eventually the best stories are the ones that bring forward universal situations and ideas. But since the dawn of history stories were always built around thoughts, ideas or experiences of individuals.
I wrote few stories after "Rapunzel and Eugene's New Adventures", with both Abigail and Iddo, my 7 years old son. Although these stories were entirely our creation, we didn't start with a blank page.
"Bot and I" helped us get started and improve. I hope this app will turn out to be as useful to you as it was to me. Here you're the creators. Instead of asking someone else to write their story for you, write your own story.