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Welcome to the next MVP Unplugged, where Microsoft MVPs share real-world projects and insights from the field! In this episode, host Justin Garrett sits down with Microsoft MVP Michael Washington to explore how he built AI Story Builders—an open-source (MIT) app that uses structured story data, embeddings, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to help authors write coherent, consistent fiction.
Michael walks through his full approach—from breaking a story into timeline, location, and character data, to using cosine similarity over text-file embeddings, to a new knowledge-graph layer that lets frontier models interrogate a story with tool calls. Whether you’re building agents, RAG apps, or AI writing tools, this episode shows a practical, repeatable pattern you can adapt today.
⭐ What You’ll Learn
✅ How to design an AI app that writes consistent stories using structure
✅ Why AI struggles to “just write the next chapter”—and how to fix it
✅ Breaking a story into timeline, location, and character data
✅ Using embeddings and cosine similarity to improve context retrieval
✅ How RAG powers real-world AI apps beyond simple prompts
✅ Why knowledge graphs unlock deeper reasoning than traditional RAG
✅ Chapter Markers
00:00 – Intro to MVP Unplugged
00:40 – Building AI Story Builders & Becoming a Microsoft MVP
03:31 – AI Story Builders Demo & Install (Microsoft Store)
04:41 – Setup: Choosing Claude Opus 4 & Creating a Story
06:18 – Why AI Can’t Just “Write the Next Chapter”
08:52 – Structuring a Story: Timeline, Location, Characters
11:37 – Text-File Embeddings & Cosine Similarity
15:49 – Importing & Exporting Stories (PDF, Word)
17:42 – How It’s Built: RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
19:13 – Knowledge Graphs for AI Storytelling
👥 Speakers
Michael Washington is a Microsoft MVP of nearly 20 years and the creator of AI Story Builders, a fully open-source (MIT) AI writing app. He fell in love with open source through the DotNetNuke project and is passionate about giving back to the developer community. Visit Michael’s site.
Justin Garrett is host of MVP Unplugged, Principal PM in Developer Relations which is part of Microsoft Cloud + AI. Justin’s career at Microsoft also spans 20 years across Windows, Bing, Edge, Web Platform, Students/University Relations, Cloud Advocacy, and most recently a leader of the MVP Program at Microsoft. Follow Justin on LinkedIn.
About MVP Unplugged
AI is reshaping how we work and live. And for developers and technologists alike, the pace of innovation–new tools, new models, patterns & practices, and even culture itself–is changing even faster. It can be difficult to know what to learn, what to prioritize, what truly lives up to the promise of unlocking creativity and boosting productivity. Join Justin Garrett, Principal PM in DevRel and leader in the Microsoft MVP Program as he speaks with MVPs to share what they’re learning using a real-world project in this conversational series. In each episode, they’ll experiment, code, and share honest insights that can make a real difference for the audience. Justin and his guests share stories of navigating technological change and look ahead for what’s next in tech. Come discover with us how to thrive in this era of AI!
🔗 Resources & Links
🌐 AI Story Builders (official site)
https://AIStoryBuilders.com
💻 AI Story Builders on GitHub (open source)
https://github.com/AIStoryBuilders/AIStoryBuilders
📊 Cytoscape.js (knowledge graph visualization library)
https://js.cytoscape.org
🚀 Try GitHub Copilot
https://github.com/features/copilot
☁️ Try Azure for free
https://aka.ms/AzureFreeTrialYT
🎥 More MVP Unplugged
YouTube playlist
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