Towards a Humorous and Empathetic Companion Dialogue System with a Cultural Persona for Older Adults

Artificial Intelligent (AI) dialogue systems have been used as companions to provide daily social support and promote healthy lifestyles for older adults. Existing studies on empathetic companionship of AI dialogue systems found that these dialogue systems have primarily focused on passive observation of scenarios and computational simulation of companionship. In addition, these dialogue systems are unable to provide tangible empathetic and humorous companionship through meaningful and purposeful involvement to alleviate loneliness of older adults while considering their cultural backgrounds. In this research-in-progress paper, we propose a companion dialogue system with an empathetic and humorous persona to actively collaborate with older adults to help curtail loneliness by resolving a task together while considering the user's cultural backgrounds. The companion dialogue system will be capable of offering personalized therapeutic intervention based on behavior modification models, fostering emotional empathy and intermediate humor via culturally rich conversational exchanges, and reducing loneliness and depression through activities that involve team cooperation.