ViEmBot: An Empathetic Voicebot System for the Vietnamese Language

In this article, we introduce ViEmBot, a voicebot system that can interact and express empathy with humans in the Vietnamese language. Compared with current voicebot systems or virtual voice assistants that support Vietnamese, ViEmBot has several outstanding differences. First, the Bot module of ViEmBot was trained on the UIT-VED-27K dataset, the first Vietnamese empathetic-dialogues dataset. Second, ViEmBot can distinguish personal pronouns in Vietnamese and respond with appropriate pronouns, which is a common practice in Vietnamese culture. This makes ViEmBot sound more natural and friendlier than other voicebot systems that apply the same personalized pronoun responses in all situations. Third, ViEmBot can understand the content and emotion of the human and respond with appropriate emotional verbal responses to empathize with the human speaker.