Emotionally intelligent chatbots-designing for empathy and emotional support: A review

Abstract

The integration of emotional Intelligence into chatbots for empathy and support has brought dramatic development to many sectors. The development has led researchers to continue experimenting and studying diverse design techniques (novel and existing) to find the method(s) that best suit the building of emotionally intelligent chatbots. To address this challenge, this paper provides a reviewed literature that extracted features such as the work done, findings, limitations, and the design techniques adopted to either improve an existing model or design a new model. Findings from the reviewed papers indicate that the reviewed paper mostly used the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model framework while incorporating it with other design techniques to improve on the seq2seq model. This is done based on the domain the model is built. However, other design techniques adopted by other reviewed papers are conditional variational auto-encoder, transformers, and a host of others. Although the researchers also incorporated other models with their main design technique to have a better system model