Human-like conversational agents as social partners: a scoping review of socioaffective mechanisms, well-being outcomes, risks and governance in the post-Turing era

“DISCUSSION: We propose an integrative pathway linking model capabilities and product design cues to relational outcomes and outline a companion-specific relational safety stack as a synthesis-based evaluation agenda rather than a validated regulatory or clinical standard. The review identifies measurement priorities for evaluating companion agents and governance priorities for managing psychosocial impact as these systems scale.”Quoted verbatim from the abstract.