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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Spencer HazelORCiD, Dr Adam BrandtORCiD
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As healthcare services deploy AI to automate patient-facing communication, concerns persist about the interactional work through which empathy is made relevant. We examine empathy not as an internal state but as an interactional accomplishment, asking how patients display orientations to an LLM-powered voice assistant’s turns as (non-)empathic in real clinical telephone calls. Using Conversation Analysis (CA) to analyse post–cataract surgery follow-up calls conducted by AI-powered voice assistant Dora (Ufonia), we compare patient responses across earlier and later system versions. Earlier calls show minimal, delayed, prosodically closed responses to wellbeing enquiries, consistent with treating Dora as a transactional information-gathering device. Later calls more often feature socially rich formats, for example colloquial upgrades, gratitude tokens, occasional return enquiries, and increased turnfinal rising intonation, suggesting patients hear Dora’s talk as socially implicative and thus opening space for affiliative/empathetic uptake. We discuss implications for CA-informed conversation design and for evaluating “empathy” via participant orientations in situ rather than post-hoc self-report.
Author(s): Hazel S, Brandt A, He YV, Lim E, Joselowitz J, Ellis Z
Editor(s): Vera Danilova, Murathan Kurfalı, Ylva Söderfeldt, Julia Reed, Andrew Burchell
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: The 19th Annual Meeting of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)
Year of Conference: 2026
Pages: 284-290
Online publication date: 28/03/2026
Acceptance date: 24/01/2026
Publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics
URL: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.healing-1.25
DOI: 10.18653/v1/2026.healing-1.25
Notes: PDF: https://aclanthology.org/2026.healing-1.25.pdf
