Ellie is a psychologist, and a damned good one at that. Smile in a certain way, and she knows     1    what your smile means.     2    a nervous tic or tension in an eye, and she instantly     3    on it. She listens to what you say,     4    every word, works out the meaning of your     5    , your tone, your posture, everything. She is at the     6    of her game but, according to a new study, her greatest     7    is that she is not human.
    When faced with tough or potentially     8    questions, people often do not tell doctors what they need to hear. Yet the researchers behind Ellie,     9    by Jonathan Gratch at the Institute for Creative Technologies, in Los Angeles,     10    from their years of     11    human interactions with computers that people might be more willing to talk if     12    with an avatar. To test this idea, they put 239 people     13    Ellie to have a chat with her about their lives. Half were told they would be interacting with an artificially intelligent     14    human; the others were told that Ellie was a bit like a     15    , and was having her strings pulled remotely by a person.
    This quality of encouraging openness and honesty, Dr Gratch believes, will be of particular value in     16    the psychological problems of soldiers—a view     17    by America's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is helping to pay for the project. Soldiers place a     18    on being tough, and many avoid seeing psychologists at all     19    . That means conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, to which military men and women are particularly prone, often get dangerous     20    they are caught.