Outcome

Sigmund Freud referred to dreams as being the royal road to the unconscious. He believed they held huge significance to our unconscious thoughts, feelings and desires. Sadly, people forget their dreams soon after they woke up. This is where the idea of Freud chatbot was born. Freud helps people understand the unknown region of their psyche through dream interpretation and visualization, and helps them document an incredible resource to gain a deeper understanding of self.

Freud chatbot is intended to solve the following problem:

Inspiration: The Interpretation of Dreams

I draw a lot of inspiration from the book'The Interpretation of Dreams’from Sigmund Freud and prepared a .txt file on symbols of dream and their representations. This is the source of verbal interpretations of dream.

Verbal interpretation: Txt file & IBM Watson’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) API

Freud was built with IBM Watson’s Natural Language Understanding APIto identify keywords or, in this case, key symbols from users’ description of their dreams, and search from the .txt file for corresponding interpretations.

Visual Interpretation:Unsplash API

To add more color to text messages, Unsplash (an visual image website) API was build in to search for key symbols and find the most relevant image that visualize their dreams.

Dream journal: database

All dreams, interpretations and images are kept in a database. Users can search for past dreams by tying in key symbols. 

In order to gain a deeper understanding of dream analysis, I read the book Interpretations of Dreams by Freud. Since I have a real person as the persona behind the bot, designing the tonality and conversation is not something I struggle with.

I drew words from the book, especially in the user onboarding process, to guide users through a “dream interpretation counseling session”. The language that Freud speaks provides a lot of guidance. He sounds compassionate, well-educated, profession, yet personable. 

I started with writing down the conversations between Freud and the user, almost like writing a screenplay and I constantly switch the roles and play Freud and the user. The process was incredibly helpful in terms of thinking through the conversation flow. I then conducted usability tests with a few people to test it out. Basically I pretend I am Freud and chat with users and see what might go wrong and what doesn’t make sense in my current flow. Revised dialog flow has taken the following factors into consideration:

Visibility and Error prevention: I want to give users option to request information at key steps in the workflow, and give them options to ‘exit’ to leave unwanted conversations. Error messages were carefully designed to offer a "menu", giving users instructions when got stuck in a workflow. I present users a confirmation option before they commit to the action, asking questions such as "Water was a symbol in your dream, is it correct?"

After an extensive research on meanings of dream symbols from various of data sources such as dreammoods.com, psychologytoday.com, I compile a list of common dream symbol and its representation in .txt file. Here is the method I used 

The next step in the process is to connect with the key symbols with Unsplash API to search for images that visualize the dream for the user. 

I envision Freud becomes an educational bot as more functionalities rolling out.

1. Users can subscribe to receive articles on different aspects of dream interpretation, or type in keywords to find an article of their interests. Users has the flexibility to choose the frequency of notification, etc.

2.Freud will take dream interpretation to the next level to remind users of similar dreams they had in the past to help them spot patterns in their dreams.

These way Freud can truly empower users to not just understand their dreams as segmented interpretations, but use a longitudinal data to analyze the patterns and provide personalized insights.