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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17466 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17466/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 141 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Do All Languages Cost the Same? Tokenization in the Era of Commercial Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13707/) (2023)
- [MindfulDiary: Harnessing Large Language Model to Support Psychiatric Patients' Journaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05231/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Large Language Models to Power Chatbots for Collecting User Self-Reported Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05843/) (2023)
- [ChaCha: Leveraging Large Language Models to Prompt Children to Share Their Emotions about Personal Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12244/) (2023)
- [AACessTalk: Fostering Communication between Minimally Verbal Autistic Children and Parents with Contextual Guidance and Card Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09641/) (2024)
- [PlanFitting: Personalized Exercise Planning with Large Language Model-driven Conversational Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12555/) (2023)
- [Audio Matters Too: How Audial Avatar Customization Enhances Visual Avatar Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05315/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 daily narratives through conversational prompts and visual supports. Autiverse elicits key details of an adolescent-selected event 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. Our findings show Autiverse scaffolded adolescents' coherent narratives, while enabling parents to learn additional details of their child's events and emotions. Moreover, the customized AI peer created a comfortable space for sharing, fostering enjoyment and a strong sense of agency. Drawing on these results, we discuss implications for adaptive scaffolding across autism profiles, socio-emotionally appropriate AI peer design, and balancing autonomy with parental involvement.