Autiverse: Eliciting Autistic Adolescents' Daily Narratives through AI-guided Multimodal Journaling

TL;DR

Autiverse presents an AI-guided multimodal journaling system that uses a peer-like AI and a token-based four-panel comic to scaffold daily narrative construction for autistic adolescents. Grounded in formative expert and parent input, the design employs an ABC-E narrative framework delivered via stepwise dialogue, balancing structured prompts with visual supports to reduce cognitive load and enhance autonomy. A two-week deployment with 10 adolescent–parent dyads in Korea demonstrates improved narrative coherence, new parental insights, and positive adolescent engagement with an autonomous, customizable AI peer. The work highlights adaptive scaffolding, socio-emotional considerations, and pathways toward scalable, parent-inclusive journaling tools for diverse autism profiles.

Abstract

Journaling can potentially serve as an effective method for autistic adolescents to improve narrative skills. However, its text-centric nature and high executive functioning demands present barriers to practice. We present Autiverse, an AI-guided multimodal journaling app for tablets that scaffolds storytelling through conversational prompts and visual supports. Autiverse elicits key details through a stepwise dialogue with peer-like, customizable AI and composes them into an editable four-panel comic strip. Through a two-week deployment study with 10 autistic adolescent-parent dyads, we examine how Autiverse supports autistic adolescents to organize their daily experience and emotion. Autiverse scaffolded adolescents' coherent narratives, while enabling parents to learn additional details of their child's events and emotions. The customized AI peer created a comfortable space for sharing, fostering enjoyment and a strong sense of agency. We discuss implications for adaptive scaffolding across autism profiles, socio-emotionally appropriate AI peer design, and balancing autonomy with parental involvement.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: The usage flow of Autiverse. [boxparam, border-radius=0pt, padding-left=2pt, padding-right=2pt, height=5.5pt, border-width=0pt, background-color=darkgray]1 The user can begin journaling in one of the three starting modes: starting with a selected place and people (ⓐ), an open-ended prompt (ⓑ), or a schedule-based prompt (ⓒ). [boxparam, border-radius=0pt, padding-left=2pt, padding-right=2pt, height=5.5pt, border-width=0pt, background-color=darkgray]2 The AI elicits an initial narrative from the user. [boxparam, border-radius=0pt, padding-left=2pt, padding-right=2pt, height=5.5pt, border-width=0pt, background-color=darkgray]3 The AI presents preliminary descriptions (ⓓ) based on the user's narrative, which the user reviews and revises on demand. [boxparam, border-radius=0pt, padding-left=2pt, padding-right=2pt, height=5.5pt, border-width=0pt, background-color=darkgray]4 The AI asks questions about missing details. If the user struggles to describe emotions, the AI provides a list of 12 example emotions (ⓗ). [boxparam, border-radius=0pt, padding-left=2pt, padding-right=2pt, height=5.5pt, border-width=0pt, background-color=darkgray]5 Based on the updated comic strips, the AI asks the user whether to make any final changes or additions. [boxparam, border-radius=0pt, padding-left=2pt, padding-right=2pt, height=5.5pt, border-width=0pt, background-color=darkgray]6 To wrap up, the AI offers an empathetic response and ⓙ title suggestions for the finalized narrative. Finally, the AI praises the user by ⓚ awarding stamps.
• Figure 2: Conversational pipeline of a journaling session of Autiverse after [phaseboxparam, background-color=preparationcolor]Preparation. All phases involve LLM-driven conversational loop with specific chatbot goals. Refer to \ref{['appendix:pipeline']} for more technical details.
• Figure 3: Parents and autistic adolescent participants are engaging in Autiverse during the introductory session.
• Figure 4: Normalized positions of first mentions and last revisions of the ABC-E information components across the conversational turns of each journal entry across all adolescent participants ([boxparam, border-width=0pt, background-color=childcolor]C1--10). Each visualization tile represents one journal entry. The color of each position marker indicates the journaling phases in which the mention occurred, while the background color of each journal entry tile denotes the actual normalized segments corresponding to each phase.
• Figure 5: Distributions of the journaling phases in which each ABC-E component was first mentioned or last revised. The y-axis indicates the number of journal entries.