OSUM-EChat: Enhancing End-to-End Empathetic Spoken Chatbot via Understanding-Driven Spoken Dialogue

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Geng, Xuelong, Shao, Qijie, Xue, Hongfei, Wang, Shuiyuan, Xie, Hanke, Guo, Zhao, Zhao, Yi, Li, Guojian, Tian, Wenjie, Wang, Chengyou, Zhao, Zhixian, Xia, Kangxiang, Zhang, Ziyu, Lin, Zhennan, Zuo, Tianlun, Shao, Mingchen, Cao, Yuang, Ma, Guobin, Li, Longhao, Dai, Yuhang, Gao, Dehui, Guo, Dake, Xie, Lei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Geng, Xuelong
Shao, Qijie
Xue, Hongfei
Wang, Shuiyuan
Xie, Hanke
Guo, Zhao
Zhao, Yi
Li, Guojian
Tian, Wenjie
Wang, Chengyou
Zhao, Zhixian
Xia, Kangxiang
Zhang, Ziyu
Lin, Zhennan
Zuo, Tianlun
Shao, Mingchen
Cao, Yuang
Ma, Guobin
Li, Longhao
Dai, Yuhang
Gao, Dehui
Guo, Dake
Xie, Lei
author_facet Geng, Xuelong
Shao, Qijie
Xue, Hongfei
Wang, Shuiyuan
Xie, Hanke
Guo, Zhao
Zhao, Yi
Li, Guojian
Tian, Wenjie
Wang, Chengyou
Zhao, Zhixian
Xia, Kangxiang
Zhang, Ziyu
Lin, Zhennan
Zuo, Tianlun
Shao, Mingchen
Cao, Yuang
Ma, Guobin
Li, Longhao
Dai, Yuhang
Gao, Dehui
Guo, Dake
Xie, Lei
contents Empathy is crucial in enabling natural interactions within spoken dialogue systems, allowing machines to recognize and respond appropriately to paralinguistic cues such as age, gender, and emotion. Recent advancements in end-to-end speech language models, which unify speech understanding and generation, provide promising solutions. However, several challenges persist, including an over-reliance on large-scale dialogue datasets, insufficient extraction of paralinguistic cues vital for conveying empathy, and the lack of empathy-specific datasets and evaluation frameworks. To address these issues, we introduce OSUM-EChat, an open-source, end-to-end spoken dialogue system designed to enhance empathetic interactions, particularly in resource-limited settings. OSUM-EChat introduces two key innovations: (1) a three-stage understanding-driven spoken dialogue training strategy that extends the capabilities of a large speech understanding model to spoken dialogue tasks, and (2) a linguistic-paralinguistic dual thinking mechanism that integrates paralinguistic understanding through a chain of thought with dialogue generation, enabling the system to produce more empathetic responses. This approach reduces reliance on large-scale dialogue datasets while maintaining high-quality empathetic interactions. Additionally, we introduce the EChat-200K dataset, a rich corpus of empathetic speech-to-speech dialogues, and the EChat-eval benchmark, a comprehensive framework for evaluating the empathetic capabilities of dialogue systems. Experimental results demonstrate that OSUM-EChat outperforms end-to-end spoken dialogue models regarding empathetic responsiveness, validating its effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09600
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OSUM-EChat: Enhancing End-to-End Empathetic Spoken Chatbot via Understanding-Driven Spoken Dialogue
Geng, Xuelong
Shao, Qijie
Xue, Hongfei
Wang, Shuiyuan
Xie, Hanke
Guo, Zhao
Zhao, Yi
Li, Guojian
Tian, Wenjie
Wang, Chengyou
Zhao, Zhixian
Xia, Kangxiang
Zhang, Ziyu
Lin, Zhennan
Zuo, Tianlun
Shao, Mingchen
Cao, Yuang
Ma, Guobin
Li, Longhao
Dai, Yuhang
Gao, Dehui
Guo, Dake
Xie, Lei
Sound
Empathy is crucial in enabling natural interactions within spoken dialogue systems, allowing machines to recognize and respond appropriately to paralinguistic cues such as age, gender, and emotion. Recent advancements in end-to-end speech language models, which unify speech understanding and generation, provide promising solutions. However, several challenges persist, including an over-reliance on large-scale dialogue datasets, insufficient extraction of paralinguistic cues vital for conveying empathy, and the lack of empathy-specific datasets and evaluation frameworks. To address these issues, we introduce OSUM-EChat, an open-source, end-to-end spoken dialogue system designed to enhance empathetic interactions, particularly in resource-limited settings. OSUM-EChat introduces two key innovations: (1) a three-stage understanding-driven spoken dialogue training strategy that extends the capabilities of a large speech understanding model to spoken dialogue tasks, and (2) a linguistic-paralinguistic dual thinking mechanism that integrates paralinguistic understanding through a chain of thought with dialogue generation, enabling the system to produce more empathetic responses. This approach reduces reliance on large-scale dialogue datasets while maintaining high-quality empathetic interactions. Additionally, we introduce the EChat-200K dataset, a rich corpus of empathetic speech-to-speech dialogues, and the EChat-eval benchmark, a comprehensive framework for evaluating the empathetic capabilities of dialogue systems. Experimental results demonstrate that OSUM-EChat outperforms end-to-end spoken dialogue models regarding empathetic responsiveness, validating its effectiveness.
title OSUM-EChat: Enhancing End-to-End Empathetic Spoken Chatbot via Understanding-Driven Spoken Dialogue
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09600