Chapter 15 Engaging Museum Visitors with AI: The Case of Chatbots Giuliano Gaia, Stefania Boiano and Ann Borda Abstract This chapter explores the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in museums and galleries in engaging their audiences, specifically through the devel- opment and use of chatbot technologies. Through a case study approach, the chapter further provides a practical focus on the design and implementation of an audience development pilot in Milan involving four historic house museums (Case Museo di Milano). The pilot aimed to find new and interesting ways to engage teenagers in visiting these museums through visualizing narrative using a convergence of chatbot and gamification platforms. 15.1 Early Speaking Machines Early speaking machines can be traced to an analogue (as compared to the more recent digital ) age of technology—i.e., the early “automata” of the late 18th and 19th centuries. The first historically documented speaking machine was made by the Hungarian author and inventor, Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804). Kempelen is particularly known for the creation of the mechanical “Turk”: a chess-playing automaton that enclosed a human person manipulating the apparent Turk machine through a series of levers. For the purposes of this chapter, Kempelen is legitimately associated with a “speaking machine” which was originally submitted to a competition set by the St. Petersburg Academy of Science in 1779 to create a machine that could utter the five vowel sounds a, e, i, o, u in the most natural manner. In his book Mechanismus der menschlichen Sprache nebst Beschreibung einer sprechenden Maschine (1791) G. Gaia (B ) · S. Boiano InvisibleStudio, London, UK e-mail: giuliano.gaia@invisiblestudio.net S. Boiano e-mail: stefania.boiano@invisiblestudio.net A. Borda The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: aborda@unimelb.edu.au © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 T. Giannini and J. P. Bowen (eds.), Museums and Digital Culture, Springer Series on Cultural Computing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97457-6_15 309