AI Empathy Research
Our research investigates how empathy expressed by AI voice assistants, agents, and companions affects human judgment and behavior. Through experiments with working AI systems, we study agentic commerce, sustainable consumption, companionship, customer service, and emotion measurement.
When a machine understands you, do you buy differently?How empathy in AI shopping agents shapes trust, product choice, decision satisfaction, and reliance.Can an empathic voice close the gap between good intentions and real behavior?Whether empathic AI advisors can turn sustainable intentions into sustainable choices, and where ethical persuasion ends.What happens when an AI companion remembers you?How empathy and long-term memory shape relationships between older adults and AI companions, and what follows for healthy aging.When things go wrong, can a machine's empathy make them right?Empathy as an emotional buffer: when an empathic response repairs a failed interaction, and when it merely decorates one.What if the voice itself could tell us how consumers feel?Voice-analytics methods that read consumer emotion directly from prosody: rhythm, intonation, pace, and the signals beneath the words.