The Museum of Kansas City has launched a new exhibit that features a conversational interactive experience with great-grandmother, businesswoman and Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski, known as “Big Sonia” and subject of the documentary of the same name.
This new exhibit is located in the museum’s third-floor gallery called “Our City, Our Stories,” and admission is free. The exhibit is presented in collaboration with Leah Warshawski, the producer and director of Inflatable Film and granddaughter of Sonia Warshawski; and StoryFile, a division of Authentic Interactions.
StoryFile created the conversational interactive experience to preserve and share the powerful testimony of Sonia Warshawski in her own words. In 2021, Sonia was recorded in a professional studio setting, where she sat in her leopard print chair and answered a series of more than 400 questions about her life, experiences and lessons of resilience. Using proprietary technology, StoryFile trained the responses to allow users to engage in conversations with Sonia’s recorded likeness.
The interactive exhibit starts with an introduction by Warshawski’s oldest daughter, Regina Kort. Then, when attendees ask Sonia a question, the system triggers the closest matching pre-recorded response, ensuring that every interaction illustrates Warshawski’s own voice and testimony. StoryFile has not used artificial intelligence to modify, alter or generate new responses — every answer comes directly from Warshawski, exactly as she shared it during the recording process.
The exhibit is supported by the Barton P. Cohen and Mary Davidson Cohen Charitable Trust housed at Midwest Trust Company.
