# Empathy Omni: Enabling Empathetic Speech Response Generation through Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18655 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18655/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02152/) (2022)
- [AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12995/) (2023)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [Kimi-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18425/) (2025)
- [Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16725/) (2024)
- [VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17196/) (2024)
- [LLaMA-Omni: Seamless Speech Interaction with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06666/) (2024)
- [FunAudioLLM: Voice Understanding and Generation Foundation Models for Natural Interaction Between Humans and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04051/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03751/) (2024)
- [SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15649/) (2024)
- [BLSP-Emo: Towards Empathetic Large Speech-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03872/) (2024)
- [Generative Expressive Conversational Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21491/) (2024)
- [VocalNet: Speech LLM with Multi-Token Prediction for Faster and High-Quality Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04060/) (2025)
- [OpenS2S: Advancing Fully Open-Source End-to-End Empathetic Large Speech Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05177/) (2025)
- [Style-Talker: Finetuning Audio Language Model and Style-Based Text-to-Speech Model for Fast Spoken Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11849/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Sympatheia: Emotionally Adaptive Voice Assistant with Continuous Affect Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00851/) (2026)
- [Bridging What the Model Thinks and How It Speaks: Expressive Speech Generation via Self-Aware Intent-Realization Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11424/) (2026)
- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the development of speech large language models (speech LLMs), users can now interact directly with assistants via speech. However, most existing models only convert response content into speech without fully capturing the rich emotional cues in user queries, where the same sentence may convey different meanings depending on the expression. Emotional understanding is thus essential for improving human-machine interaction. Most empathetic speech LLMs rely on massive datasets, demanding high computational cost. A key challenge is to build models that generate empathetic responses with limited data and without large-scale training. To this end, we propose Emotion Omni, a model that understands emotional content in user speech and generates empathetic responses. We further developed a data pipeline to construct a 200k emotional dialogue dataset supporting empathetic speech assistants. Experiments show that Emotion Omni achieves comparable instruction-following ability without large-scale pretraining, while surpassing existing models in speech quality (UTMOS:4.41) and empathy (Emotion GPT Score: 3.97). These results confirm its improvements in both speech fidelity and emotional expressiveness. Demos are available at https://w311411.github.io/omni_demo/.