arXiv:2606.12902v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue systems require not only semantically appropriate responses but also emotionally aligned prosodic expression. However, cascade pipelines often discard acoustic cues during speech-to-text conversion, while end-to-end speech models lack interpretable control over emotion and knowledge integration. To address these challenges, we propose PRISM, a multi-agent framework for empathetic spoken dialogue that decouples speech perception, response generation, and speech synthesis into coordinated components. PRISM introduces a pr
Advances in multi-modal AI and agentic architectures are converging to enable more sophisticated and nuanced human-computer interactions, making empathetic AI a current research frontier.
Developing empathetic spoken dialogue systems with integrated prosody is crucial for creating more natural, effective, and trustworthy AI agents that can operate across various high-stakes domains.
The ability to decouple and coordinate speech perception, response generation, and synthesis with emotional alignment provides a more interpretable and controllable pathway towards advanced empathetic AI.
- · AI agents developers
- · Customer service industries
- · Mental health tech
- · Generative AI platforms
- · Traditional, non-empathetic chatbot providers
- · Companies reliant solely on text-based AI
More natural and persuasive AI-human interactions become possible.
Public acceptance and reliance on AI agents in sensitive applications could significantly increase.
The definition of 'human-like' interaction in AI may shift, leading to new ethical and regulatory considerations.
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Read at arXiv cs.CL