Kelly Bouquet is a member of what was once called the “Greatest Generation.” But that generation is disappearing.
The museum estimates that 131 World War II veterans die every day. In a new exhibit called “Voices from the Front,” the museum is photographing a generation’s memories before they are all lost and using artificial intelligence and voice recognition software to index their memories in a way that allows visitors to “converse.” is creating. Americans during World War II and for decades to come.
Of the 16.1 million Americans who served in the war, only 119,550 (less than 1 percent) are still alive, according to data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs last year. Under the department’s plan, only a few hundred Americans who served in World War II will remain alive by 2036.
“We are in a race against time,” said Peter Crean, the museum’s deputy director and a retired U.S. Army colonel who spearheaded the Voices from the Front line, which opened this month.
Of the 18 people interviewed and featured in the exhibit, three died before seeing themselves on screen, including the last to receive the Medal of Honor during World War II for the Battle of Iwo Jima. Zima, which also includes Hershel Woodrow “Woody” Williams, a survivor of .
“Woody was the last one,” Crean said. “So this is now the only place where you can talk to a World War II Medal of Honor recipient.”
Thanks to a $1.5 million donation from supporters, the museum arranged for 13 cameras to film the exhibit’s subjects from all angles, creating a three-dimensional video.
When Kelly Bouquet flew from her home in Leland, North Carolina, to a film studio in Los Angeles, the filmmakers at Storyfile told her to wear two identical outfits for two days of interviews. asked her.
After the war, a large brooch in the shape of Tinker Bell, for whom she modeled for Disney, was pinned to the same spot on her sweater every day. Once she sat in her blue armchair, the film’s production team marked the position of her feet and hands, followed her throughout filming, and asked her nearly 1,000 questions. That way, each time the virtual Kelly Bouquet finishes answering on the video, the first image will return to the same position. In between questions, her video face stares intently ahead and nods, as if listening to the visitor’s next question.
Future advances in technology may make interviews holographic, and visitors entering a museum may find a three-dimensional Kelly Bork sitting in a chair, waiting to be spoken to.
The exhibit uses voice recognition to process visitor questions and AI to retrieve relevant answers from subject interviews. The video response itself is not generated by AI. Instead, the AI finds the best clips from your interviews.
Currently, it can take up to 20 seconds for the AI to find the right answer and play the corresponding clip. But as more visitors ask questions, the AI gets “smarter”, improving indexing and reducing response times to seconds.
Shortly after the “Voices from the Front” video was released, Kelly Bouquet stood to the side and watched intently as she answered visitors’ questions about her work on an early television variety show. was.
After answering, Kelly Bouquet’s face lit up. “I was amazing!” she said, linking arms with her husband of four years, Robert Bouquet, 98. She remained on American soil during the war, while he served in the 86th Infantry Division, serving in both the European and Pacific theaters.
Two of the people interviewed were telecommuters, Kelly Bouquet and Grace Janota Brown, who were manufacturing parts for the Boeing B-17 heavy bomber. The remaining 16 were soldiers who served in World War II. Among them was Theodore Britton, who was part of the first class of black recruits in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942 and later became U.S. ambassador to Barbados and Grenada. U.S. Army Nurse Virginia Lehman Wilterdink. U.S. Army German Interpreter Robert Wolfe. Holocaust survivor Ben Lesser. Jeep driver Romay Johnson Davis. and Lawson Iichiro Sakaru of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of second-generation Japanese Americans that has become the most decorated unit in U.S. Army history.
Kelly Bouquet and her husband had their first date a quarter century ago in Los Angeles, several years after the war. He then graduated from college and moved to San Francisco to work for Mobil Oil. She remained in Hollywood, where she served as a reference model for Tinker Bell in the 1953 animated film version of Peter Pan, where she spent nine months on the Disney stage wearing a swimsuit.
It is also recorded for posterity.
On the exhibit’s opening day, Crean, the museum’s deputy director, walked over to the Voices From the Front console and scrolled down to Margaret Kelly-Bourke’s name on the control panel. I pressed the “Ask a Question” button and he said, “How did you become Tinker Bell?” As her computer’s AI searches for terms related to her interview, Kelly Bouquet’s image on the screen appears to be listening and nodding. I did. Then the story began about that fateful day when I received a call from Disney saying they were looking for dancers and actresses to model for their 3.5-inch animated fairies.
As soon as museum staff activated the Voice from the Front desk console, Crean saw families flocking in, asking questions, sometimes for 30 or 45 minutes at a time. When they leave, he said, people will say “goodbye.” He waves his hand as if he’s talking to a real person.
“They’re speaking in a pre-recorded interview, and we’re hearing answers that were recorded two years ago. But the way the video itself is presented makes it feel real and great without feeling fake.” “We can do that,” Crean said.
Young visitors, already accustomed to long conversations on screens, easily navigated the new exhibits, giving curators a preview of how best to engage future generations in the field of history.
To demonstrate the range of questions the video avatar can answer, Crean scrolled through Medal of Honor recipient Williams and asked trivial questions about his favorite color and food. Williams responded immediately.
Then Crean threw him a curveball. “Can you tell me about existentialism?” he asked. “I don’t have an answer to that question,” Williams replied. “Please ask me something else.”
Even if some visitors ask stupid questions, Kelly Bouquet sees Voice from the Front as having a serious purpose. “It helps answer questions about your family,” she says. “People can ask someone a question and say, ‘That’s what my grandfather or grandmother did in the war.'”
Kelly Bouquet said it’s common for families to hear nothing about World War II from soldiers returning from combat. “So many people came home and didn’t want to talk about the war,” she says. “Trauma was prevalent.”
Devin Dumas, 24, a visitor from New Orleans, pulled up a metal stool to the console and looked over the list of questions Williams had proposed. “What was it like to be a flamethrower operator?” he asked.
Wearing a vintage Marine Corps garrison dress cap and a silver Medal of Honor star on a chain around his neck, Mr. Williams held a flamethrower at a Japanese machine gunner firing from a fortified pillbox during the battle on Iwo Jima. He explained how he defeated it. . Even though Mr. Williams was born 77 years before Mr. Dumas and died in 2022, Mr. Dumas asked questions about Mr. Williams’ childhood in West Virginia and how Mr. Williams weighed 3.5 pounds. The two seemed to be having a natural conversation, explaining things. When he was born, he was not expected to live.
For Dumas, the experience was like “sitting in Mr. Woody’s house.”
Following the instructions provided, Dumas asks Williams about his best friend Vernon, and Williams’ voice cracks in the video as he describes how the two were inseparable until Vernon was killed on Iwo Jima. True to their promise, Williams, then 22, removed the precious ring from his dead friend’s finger and fought out the rest of his time on the island with Vernon’s ring in his pocket. Upon his return in 1945, Williams borrowed his car and delivered the ring to Vernon’s father.
Dumas asked, speechless. He later said the story reminded him of the bond he had with his best friend, a man he couldn’t imagine losing.
That is, people often connect best with history through the stories of others, and that what is currently at risk of being lost extends beyond the personal experiences of veterans to include the memories of many fallen comrades and loved ones. It extends to people’s memories and reminds us that they continue to live only in a world that is rapidly disappearing. generation.
