.Comfess web: https://musk_machine.surge.sh/

When was the last time you confessed yourself? Probably, you cannot remember when that was. Indeed, what used to be a very common religious act in the past has nowadays become a rare action, as understood within the religious system. As a matter of fact, searching for a definition of “confession” in the dictionary, we can find that the various meanings are related to religion and sins: to acknowledge (sin) to God or to a priest. However, we wondered what is a confession to us? Does a person have to admit their sins to a priest in order to call the said action a “confession”, or can it be a complete individual and personal act with a will to express be heard as only motivation? Consequently, to group discussions, we agreed to say that confessing has a relation with faith, but that faith does not necessarily mean religion. One can have faith in something, yet not believe in a god or any form of religious symbol. 

To express themselves, people need to feel a level of confidence, of belief in whom or what they are talking to, in our case, a machine. The machine, or in other words, our e-confessional. As we see that the act of confession changed throughout the generations, likewise did confessionals. The confessional, as it was understood until now, has changed. It does not need to be a place of religious worship of any sort. 

To transmit those changing meanings, we created an e-confessional where people can have access to at any time and from any device. This confessional allows the user to vent, and at the same time feel heard and even understood, firstly by questioning their faith in a more or less conscious manner, then by simply speaking. Our project has a direct relation with the topic of the course: City and faith, believing in AI, because throughout the entire process we found ourselves having to face some ethical matters at the point of believing or not, trusting or not the machine to let it have any importance to the user. Would the user have their faith self questioned?

The exploration through the sensors and the data that they can collect from a user, the security behind web applications,  and the study of creating new interesting and individual shapes through parametric equations resulted in different tests that combined showed the actual potential of the project and how with little amount of data we could build a complete digital artifact.  

Here you can see a video of how the web works. You only have to follow the instructions and flow...

Watching the ideas of the UX and UI team, we decided to skip the buttons in our final prototype and instead, use the voice data with speech recognition to scroll between pages, the experience would be almost completely done by speaking to the machine, which was also the objective of the conceptual part of the project involving speaking with our tool. Just after that, we also went and introduced the speech recognition as a "sentiment recognition" system (also using ml5 sentiment library), to be able to modify the color of our artifact everytime the sentiment of the phrases that the user told the machine changed for better or for worse. Now, the whole confession was activated, created, modulated and finished by using the user's voice as the main controller. 

The final step, was putting the conceptual statement, graphic application, responsiveness and the confession artifact all together in one final prototype, that used the speaking as the activator of the different pages. We merged the HTML and CSS skeleton with the Javascript previously done for the interpretation and built everything using SVG files that the graphic group made with the statements and shapes of the text, that the we could modify to make the page responsive to anyone. 

The prototype was uploaded using Surge and Node.js to its host, and the page was adjusted to the main display sizes on computers. The prototype has to be opened using the Google Chrome navigator in full screen, due to security issues related to the microphone input.

For this project I developed the graphic part, but it was a group project. We were a total of ten people working on this project.