WHATELY — Several years ago, Whately resident Jonathan Edwards’ daughter embarked on a field trip with her fifth grade class to learn about Boston’s history.
To the disappointment of her father, a lifelong history buff, she returned from Boston with a lukewarm review. After his daughter described talking to history experts about the monuments’ stories, listening to facts through headphones on tours and “looking at a building around a bunch of other tall buildings,” Edwards realized something.
“Oh, we’re using 20th-century technology to deliver 21st-century content to 21st-century … students or adults,” Edwards remembers thinking. “This is why we’re losing interest in history, because our communication and delivery methods are dated.”
A study by the American Historical Association that surveyed 76 colleges and universities in the U.S. and three in Canada found that enrollment in history courses in the 2022-2023 school year had dropped by 4.4% since the 2019-2020 school year. Of the 79 schools surveyed, 54 saw lower enrollment in the 2022-2023 school year than three years before.
At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, history majors accounted for less than 1% of the student population in the fall of 2025. The number of history majors had increased slightly between 2016 and 2020 before dropping by about 9% between 2020 and 2025, from 253 to 230 students.
“I want to make history fun again,” Edwards said. “As years go by, I started to think, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be cool to do an audio recreation — a literal time machine to the extent possible to go back and not only see what Boston was like in 1770 or 1773, or Fenway Park before it was built, but actually talk with the people who lived that history through AI.”
About a year after Edwards founded the artificial intelligence platform Virtual Wayback in November 2024, he and his team partnered with America250 to create “AudioDesk.” The AI program allows users to talk to virtual recreations of historical figures on the Virtual Wayback website, virtualwayback.com. Schools must fill out an online form and pay a fee to incorporate the technology into their classrooms.
Starting with Founding Father John Adams, Edwards and his team of technicians used AI software to create a “knowledge base” with information on the crew of figures from their writings, speech transcripts and other documents chronicling their mark on American history. For Edwards, researching events like the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Bunker Hill introduced him to the roster of figures ready to talk.
“Some you’ve heard of, and some you’ve never heard of, but we all have a story and all of our stories are impactful in their own way,” Edwards said. “I know my history, but boy, do I know it a lot better now than I ever did before.”
Among the AudioDesk party is Deborah Sampson, a woman from Plympton who disguised herself as a man to join the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War; Salem Poor, a formerly enslaved man from Andover who bought his freedom after fighting in Bunker Hill; Sarah Bradlee Fulton, known as the “Mother of the Boston Tea Party” for suggesting the patriots disguise themselves as Native Americans; and other names often in the margins of American history books.
To finesse these figures’ voices, the AI model pulls from information on their backgrounds to determine their accents and accounts by listeners describing the figures’ distinct cadences.
When a friend and teacher complained to him about 18th President Ulysses S. Grant’s high-pitched voice, Edwards replied, “Well, guess what, Ulysses S. Grant hated his voice.”
“This is not an exercise in making historical figures what we would like them to be — this is an exercise in bringing historical figures as much back to life as is possible,” Edwards explained.
Since the start of AudioDesk, students in more than 20 schools have asked household names and underdogs from American history questions about their lives and beliefs.
The characters skirt questions about the present, however, sticking to their time period and documented information.
Although Edwards’ initial plan called for a full cast of characters from the American Revolution by the country’s 250th birthday, he plans to continue adding names from other touchstones in the United States’ past, like the French and Indian War and Underground Railroad.
“The sky’s really the limit in terms of what I want to do with this,” Edwards said, “and money.”
He stressed that the technology is not meant to replace the work of historians and teachers, but “augment” their work, “like picking the right textbook to give to your students or picking the right novel for students to read.” Unlike a textbook or novel, AudioDesk catapults history into the present with AI technology, he said.
He recalled a fifth grade teacher telling him about a student’s excitement over chatting with Virtual Wayback’s version of political philosopher and writer Thomas Payne.
“In a year, will she remember who Thomas Payne was? Maybe not,” Edwards said, “but she’ll remember that she found history fun, and isn’t that a good thing?”
