Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A person who needs psychological help has to overcome an internal barrier before deciding to see a psychotherapist. On the other hand, obtaining an anonymous online consultation or taking an online test is psychologically easy. At the same time, state-of-the-art solutions of this sort are limited. Here a prototype of an intelligent assistant is presented that should help to alleviate the problem. The prototype is an embodied actor with socially emotional capabilities. Implementation is based on cognitive modeling and machine learning. The prototype is capable of conducting an initial psychological screening during a natural conversation with the user. As a result, the system can determine psychological characteristics of user’s personality and give further recommendations. Systems of this sort could be used beyond psychological counseling and can be expected to have an impact on the healthcare system in general.