Aida: An Artificially Intelligent Depression Handling Assistant

Abstract

Aida is a conversational AI chatbot for mental health that can assist those suffering from depression, anxiety, and stress, among other things. This chatbot application was designed primarily for individuals who have difficulty accepting help from a mental health professional or their family. The last several years have taught us the value of mental wellbeing. Psychotherapists charge exorbitant fees every session, and a middle-class guy cannot afford to spend his money on items he thinks are non-essentials. Aida could behave as your companion and communicate with you anytime you require it. It is a program that assists users in overcoming negative emotions and ideas. From natural language input, it deduces a user's core emotions. Using this emotion as the base, the chatbot will try to have a friendly conversation with the user until his mental state has improved. Rasa open-source library has been used to implement the chatbot and a web widget is designed to deploy it on a website. A Between-subject study has been conducted on 20 subjects where the users were asked to use two chatbot widgets, one created by me and the other by Botfront, testing different depression modules being offered. The results are that both widgets are almost similar in terms of user satisfaction even though the task completion time is more in the widget created by me.