Narratives and Therapeutic Conversational Agents
"Narrative" is one of key words in the modern society. Giddens pointed out a central role of narratives of the self in some literatures on self-actualization in the late modern society. Kobayashi claimed that there are increasing people trying to write life histories of themselves, and industries aiming at satisfying demand of these people like manuals for making narratives of selves, publishers, and so on, called "narrative industries", have appeared. There is a possibility that the research field of artificial intelligence is also affected by this cultural trend. In fact, Sengers argued introduction of narrative theories to architectures of artificial agents. The bartender agent produced by Isbister and Hayes-Roth can be considered to be a successful one along the narrative approach. This agent was not strictly based on the narrative approach. However, the agent has her original background like her life history and encourages interaction with users based on the background.