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98 Socially Intelligent Agents

ordinary knowledge about liquor, and they are not members of the mailing list.
Each subject was shown the VEs’ conversation about brandy for three minutes
and could comment on a point made by a VE when s/he feels an interest in the
speech anytime.
The following is part of a conversation between VEs A, B, C and D and a

subject .
A: “Let’s talk about brandy.”
B: “We have more prejudice against brandy than other liquor.”
A: “I often chat over drinking.”
C: “A lot of bars don’t serve brandy because it is too expensive.”
B: “Yes, certainly.”
A: “Sure.”
Subject: “Convenience stores don’t deal in brandy either.”

C: “Shouchu is cheaper than brandy.”
In the conversation, line 4 follows line 3 mainly because of the coherence
criterion for storytelling. Both messages have been humanly labeled with the
same key word “shouchu” in advance since these two messages originally ap-
peared in the context of the advantages of shouchu. And the short responses
“Yes, certainly” and “Sure” are randomly inserted in place of other messages
from the personal memories to make the conversation rhythmic.
After the conversation, the subjects were asked whether they thought it was
easier to comment on the messages of other persons using text-based mailing
lists or the EgoChat system.

4.2 Results and Discussion
Two subjects answered that the EgoChat system was easier and more casual
than a mailing list because a chat-style conversation with voices facilitated
their interaction with VEs. This suggests that using storytelling agents with
voices may facilitate interaction between humans and agents. For our previous
system, CoMeMo-Community, we evaluated to what extent people shared their
knowledgebythevirtualexchangeofmessagesbytext-basedwordsandimages.
The results for CoMeMo-Community were satisfactory [4]. Hence, we expect
that the EgoChat, owing to its use of more human-like modalities such as voice
and gestures, will bring community members more knowledge than CoMeMo-
Community.
One subject answered that interacting with VEs is too unnatural for smooth
communication because VEs can’t answer to his questions. Certainly, the sto-
rytelling method on EgoChat is not powerful enough to give concise responses
to users. On the other hand, EgoChat can easily store and process a great
number of messages because the representation of personal memories and the
methods of ordering messages are very simple. We are planning to practically