Perception of Empathy in Mental Health Care Through Voice-Based Conversational Agent Prototypes: Experimental Study

Recognizing empathy levels in CA prototypes proved challenging, highlighting possible complexities involved with voice-based empathy detection. The perception of empathy may also be affected by different ethnic and gender-based factors. The study findings emphasize the importance of personalized communications by CAs, with expressions of empathy tailored to key demographic characteristics of users. Future studies in a similar context would benefit from the inclusion of participants who are end users of a mental health care service with more balanced gender and age distributions. Multimodal interactions could also be considered for CA prototype development.