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98 Socially Intelligent Agentsordinary knowledge about liquor, and they are not members of the mailing list.Each subject was shown the VEs’ conversation about brandy for three minutesand could comment on a point made by a VE when s/he feels an interest in thespeech anytime.The following is part of a conversation between VEs A, B, C and D and asubject ½ .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 ¾ is cheaper than brandy.”In the conversation, line 4 follows line 3 mainly because of the coherencecriterion for storytelling. Both messages have been humanly labeled with thesame key word “shouchu” in advance since these two messages originally appearedin the context of the advantages of shouchu. And the short responses“Yes, certainly” and “Sure” are randomly inserted in place of other messagesfrom the personal memories to make the conversation rhythmic.After the conversation, the subjects were asked whether they thought it waseasier to comment on the messages of other persons using text-based mailinglists or the EgoChat system.4.2 Results and DiscussionTwo subjects answered that the EgoChat system was easier and more casualthan a mailing list because a chat-style conversation with voices facilitatedtheir interaction with VEs. This suggests that using storytelling agents withvoices may facilitate interaction between humans and agents. For our previoussystem, CoMeMo-Community, we evaluated to what extent people shared theirknowledge by the virtual exchange of messages by text-based words and images.The results for CoMeMo-Community were satisfactory [4]. Hence, we expectthat the EgoChat, owing to its use of more human-like modalities such as voiceand gestures, will bring community members more knowledge than CoMeMo-Community.One subject answered that interacting with VEs is too unnatural for smoothcommunication because VEs can’t answer to his questions. Certainly, the storytellingmethod on EgoChat is not powerful enough to give concise responsesto users. On the other hand, EgoChat can easily store and process a greatnumber of messages because the representation of personal memories and themethods of ordering messages are very simple. We are planning to practically