Sympatheia: Emotionally Adaptive Voice Assistant with Continuous Affect Conditioning
Empathetic spoken dialogue systems must infer a user's emotional state to respond appropriately, yet everyday speech often carries weak, neutral, or ambiguous affective cues. To address this, we introduce Sympatheia, a speech-to-speech dialogue framework conditioned on affect inferred from the user's speech and, when available, explicit affect specifications provided as a continuous valence--arousal (VA) control signal by a multimodal sensing module or user interface. To train our model, we construct Sympatheia-18k, an emotion-conditioned synthetic spoken dialogue corpus with 12 emotion anchors. This dataset includes an emotional split for learning affective speech behavior, and a neutral...
| Authors | Sukru Samet Dindar, Riki Shimizu, Xilin Jiang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 30 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 May 2026 |
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