Empathy-GPT: Leveraging Large Language Models to Enhance Emotional Empathy and User Engagement in Embodied Conversational Agents

Emotional empathy, the ability to understand and respond to others’ emotions, is essential for effective communication. We propose Empathy-GPT, featuring embodied conversational agents with empathic capacity. To address the limitations of rule-based conversational agents, we leverage contextual understanding and adaptation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to coordinate multiple modalities (e.g., agent’s tone, body movements, and facial expressions). To enhance user engagement in human-agent communication, agents dynamically respond to users’ voices and facial expressions, providing contextually empathic responses.