Fruit Tree Labs is a start-up company that is born out of the European Research and Development environment, consisting of interdisciplinary collaborative projects between Academia, Industry and SMEs.
In this first of a series of Blog posts about the company, we start off by telling the story of how it all started. So, without further ado...
Humble Beginnings...
In 2016, with our friends and colleagues from Roessingh Research and Development and the University of Twente in the Netherlands, we successfully proposed a EU Horizon 2020 project called "Council of Coaches", which would later prove to be the starting point for Fruit Tree Labs and our open-source dialogue platform.
Council of Coaches would build a virtual group of health advisors that could debate among themselves, and with the user, in order to provide balanced lifestyle advice. The 1996 video game Sid Meier's Civilization II included a "Council of Advisors", who would provide different viewpoints on what the player should focus on in successfully managing their civilizations. Council of Coaches raised the question: can we apply that concept to a more serious use case? And the answer was yes...
Image: From "High Council" to "Council of Coaches".
The Council of Coaches
Council of Coaches was one of 7 projects out of 187 submitted proposals that was granted funding in the H2020-PM-15 call. The project received around €4 million in R&D funding, and ran between September 2017 and 2020 (3 years). The project generated three main outcomes:
- A proof of concept showing that vicarious persuasion and a council of health advisors is indeed a viable approach to health and lifestyle coaching (Hurmuz et al., 2022).
- A highly innovative platform for the creation of 3D embodied conversational agent applications, integrating various tools developed by the University of Twente, Sorbonne University, and the University of Dundee, published under the "Agents United" initiative.
- And finally, a branching dialogue platform that was purposely built to power the proof-of-concept demonstrator shown above (see www.council-of-coaches.eu).
The Birth of DialogueBranch
During Council of Coaches we investigated existing solutions that could support our requirements for implementing branching dialogue that could be authored by domain experts. We really wanted to have full control over the dialogues we presented to our users, instead of moving to dialogue generation tools. Some of the solutions that appeared on our radar were Twine, Dialogue Designer, and Yarn. Yarn appeared to be the most promising, although being aimed at game developers, had some features that we considered too complex. Combined with the fact that Yarn wasn't nearly as popular, well-documented and well-supported as it is today, we decided to build our own language, parser and tools. Thus, the first iteration of DialogueBranch was born.
Growing into Maturity
The dialogue platform that was first created during Council of Coaches (2017-2020) has survived the "R&D Valley of Death" and has seen multiple further applications after the end of the project.
After the end of Council of Coaches, the EU H2020 Project "SmartWork", the EU AAL Project "Leaves", and a Dutch national research project "PACO" were the first three digital health use cases that used the dialogue platform to power a conversational agent component. From 2021 to 2023, the platform has seen steady growth, further supported by and used in EU Horizon 2020 projects "RE-SAMPLE", and "iHelp".
Looking forward...
Even though the dialogue platform has seen growth, both in uptake and in development, the platform has never been the primary focus of any of its contributors. With the founding of Fruit Tree Labs, that has changed, as we are fully committed to the uptake and development of the new DialogueBranch platform.
Over the next weeks, we will continue the story of Fruit Tree Labs. If you want to stay informed, please follow our Twitter account @FruitTreeLabs, or if you have any questions or comments, send us a message.
