CuentosIE: can a chatbot about "tales with a message" help to teach emotional intelligence?
This is an incremental tool for educators and psychologists to teach and monitor emotional intelligence in students or patients.
The authors tackled the problem of teaching emotional intelligence by developing CuentosIE, an educational chatbot that uses 'tales with a message' to educate users about emotions and provide monitoring tools for teachers and psychologists, with preliminary evaluation showing encouraging results.
In this article, we present CuentosIE (TalesEI: chatbot of tales with a message to develop Emotional Intelligence), an educational chatbot on emotions that also provides teachers and psychologists with a tool to monitor their students/patients through indicators and data compiled by CuentosIE. The use of "tales with a message" is justified by their simplicity and easy understanding, thanks to their moral or associated metaphors. The main contributions of CuentosIE are the selection, collection, and classification of a set of highly specialized tales, as well as the provision of tools (searching, reading comprehension, chatting, recommending, and classifying) that are useful for both educating users about emotions and monitoring their emotional development. The preliminary evaluation of the tool has obtained encouraging results, which provides an affirmative answer to the question posed in the title of the article.