When Empathy Needs a Map: Benchmarking Tool‑Augmented Emotional Support
Empathy is easy to fake for one sentence. A chatbot can say “that sounds exhausting” without knowing anything about you, your situation, your city, your time zone, or whether the advice it is about to give is physically possible. That is the awkward part of emotional support AI: the tone can be soft while the facts are made of air. A very caring assistant can still recommend a midnight walk at 3 p.m., suggest a closed café, or confidently invent local details because it wants to be helpful. The kindness is real enough in style. The grounding is not. ...